How to launch AI-Native Marketing Campaigns

Summary

---

MarTech Podcast™ Episode Summary

Episode Title: How to Launch AI-Native Marketing Campaigns
Host: Benjamin Shapiro
Guest: Brendan Ferdinand, Co-founder & Chief Evangelist at Knack
Date: August 3, 2026

---

Overview

In this episode, Benjamin Shapiro interviews Brendan Ferdinand about the realities, potential, and best practices of launching AI-native marketing campaigns in the modern enterprise environment. The discussion bridges the transformation from legacy marketing workflows to AI-driven approaches, the human role in campaign creation, and actionable advice for marketing leaders navigating this new era.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Pre-AI Marketing Workflows vs. AI-Powered Campaigns

• Legacy Challenges:
  • Campaigns required coordination across 20+ people and 10-12 tools.
  • Marketers were "hamstrung" by resource limits, decision bottlenecks, and the friction between agencies and internal teams.
  • Special campaigns were infrequent due to complexity and lag time.

  "It was tough as a marketer to build those campaigns and actually do the marketing that I always wanted..." —Brendan Ferdinand [05:02]

• AI-Driven Shift:
  • AI removes bottlenecks around technology and throughput.
  • There are no longer limitations on the number of marketing ideas executed.
  • Marketers can theoretically launch a tailored campaign daily.

  "Now all of those ideas are possible to actually execute on. That obviously wasn't the case in the past." —Brendan Ferdinand [06:49]

2. Volume vs. Quality: Avoiding 'Pickle Jar' Overload

• New Challenge: Market saturation—how many campaigns is too many?
• Metric of Success: Engagement becomes the critical indicator; relevance, not just volume, wins.

  "Engagement, especially in the age of AI, is king... you have to maybe feed some of your audience a few more pickles than they’re used to eating before you realize, okay, this is the right amount." —Brendan Ferdinand [09:59]

• Balancing Act: Increased throughput should not result in market fatigue or "AI slop."

3. Personalization and Relevance at Scale

• The Five Pillars of Campaign Effectiveness:
  • Relevance
  • Interest to the audience
  • Timeliness
  • Personalization
  • Sufficient scale to justify execution

  "All five of those were not things that historically enterprises were even able to pick off. ...Now you have access to all five." —Brendan Ferdinand [12:45]

4. The Role of Humans in AI Campaigns

• Human Touch as Differentiator:
  • Organizations like OpenAI deliberately include humans "in the loop" to preserve taste and judgment.
  • Avoiding "AI slop": Marketers must ensure campaigns aren't just high-speed, high-volume noise.

  "They do not want to lose the taste in their marketing... They really don’t want to put ‘AI slop’ out." —Brendan Ferdinand [14:05]

5. Real-World Example: OpenAI’s AI-Augmented Workflow

• Workflow Breakdown:
  • Campaign ideation starts as a Slack message (unstructured).
  • Agent interacts in Slack, extracting info and building a structured brief.
  • Agent populates the brief into Linear (ticketing/project management).
  • Another agent pulls brief details, generates creative assets via Knack.
  • Marketer reviews, edits, and applies “taste” to campaign output.

  "Marketer says…in Slack. And that kicks off a whole process with agents... What the agent is doing…is pulling all the information out of the marketer." —Brendan Ferdinand [15:51–17:30]

6. Digital Nucleus of Modern Campaigns

• Omni-Channel Reality:
  • Even guerrilla, TV, or event campaigns funnel engagement digitally.
  • All marketing now centers on digital assets as the core nucleus.

  "The next step is always digital… they do coalesce around a digital kind of nucleus." —Brendan Ferdinand [22:25]

7. Reducing Friction: The Rise of 'Full Stack' Marketers

• Shifting Roles:
  • Modern marketers can do all steps—ideation to execution—enabled by AI and better workflows.
  • The transition from 'T-shaped' (broad + deep expertise in one area) to 'square-shaped' (broad, cross-functional skills).

  "What if every marketer at our organization could be a full-stack marketer…Every marketer now is more like a square-shaped marketer." —Brendan Ferdinand [25:44]

8. Practical Advice: Where Should Marketing Leaders Start?

• First Steps for New CMOs/Leaders:

  1. Map out “How do we go to market?” — Audit every step from idea to customer.
  2. Identify the single biggest constraint (“Goldratt’s Theory”—there is always one bottleneck).
  3. Remove that constraint to unlock throughput and value.

  "Every production line has exactly one constraint...You need to solve for the one constraint…and you will unlock a new world of throughput." —Brendan Ferdinand [27:35]

• Mindset Shift: Focus on repeatable, always-on campaign production—not just one-offs.

  "The biggest mind shift: Now that we can produce more than ever, what should we produce, how do we produce it, and how do we evaluate whether it is efficient or not?" —Benjamin Shapiro [30:55]

9. Case Study: YouTube’s Focus on Speed

• Relevance & Timeliness Impact:
  • Speed to market means millions more viewers.
  • Small improvements in campaign latency and relevance yield large business gains.

  "They say literally hours, minutes count...those getting in the hands of their audience faster...mean literally millions more people watching on their platform." —Brendan Ferdinand [31:27]

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Engagement Metrics:

  "Engagement...is king." —Brendan Ferdinand [09:59]

• On Volume vs. Quality:

  "You can increase volume now, but that doesn't mean you should be sending everyone a message every hour." —Brendan Ferdinand [09:38]

• On Personalization:

  "Inside that pickle jar are different flavors of pickles... you're actually able to send and communicate with people in the way that they want." —Brendan Ferdinand [11:18]

• On AI & Human Creativity:

  "They can't live without a human touch on every campaign they do." —Brendan Ferdinand describing OpenAI [14:05]

• On the Elimination of Tech Handoffs:

  "Any handoff to a technical person... will be gone in the next three years." —Brendan Ferdinand [43:14]

• On Marketing Team Nourishment:

  "The dino nuggets is the space to be creative... the mac and cheese is actually the experimentation part." —Brendan Ferdinand [42:25]

---

Timestamps of Important Segments

| Timestamp | Segment | |-----------|---------| | 05:00 | Pre-AI campaign challenges | | 06:50 | How AI enables unprecedented campaign execution | | 09:59 | Metrics and market saturation ("right amount of pickles") | | 12:29 | Factors for campaign relevance and scaling | | 13:38 | Where AI fails; importance of human touch | | 15:51 | OpenAI's AI-powered campaign workflow | | 22:05 | Integrating digital and real-world campaigns | | 25:44 | Rise of full-stack marketers and reducing friction | | 26:45 | Tactical advice for new leaders: process evaluation & constraints | | 31:27 | YouTube and the importance of real-time campaigns | | 33:28 | Lightning round: Essential AI tools & workflow changes | | 43:14 | Marketing workflow expected to disappear: technical handoff |

---

Actionable Takeaways

• Audit and streamline your campaign process to remove bottlenecks (“Goldratt’s Theory”).
• Prioritize engagement and relevance over sheer campaign volume.
• Embed AI into your workflow, but keep humans "in the loop" at key creative checkpoints.
• Enable your marketers to be ‘full stack’—able to run campaigns end-to-end.
• Transition mindset from one-off campaigns to an always-on, iterative, and data-driven campaign engine.
• Use current AI tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Claude) not just for ideation but to integrate directly into your campaign production.

---

Lightning Round Highlights

• Essential Tool: “Use the AI tools you already have—embed them deeply in workflow” [33:37]
• Platform Design: "The UI isn’t the product—enabling incredible marketing is." [35:14]
• Workflow Disappearing: "Any handoff to a technical person...will be gone.” [43:14]
• Parenting-Led Management: “No one kid [team member] is the same as another...Align people to where they do their best work.” [41:18]
• Team Nourishment: "Space to be creative" and "room to experiment" are the dino nuggets and mac & cheese of team dynamics. [42:25]

---

Conclusion

This episode delivers clear, experience-driven guidance on integrating AI into marketing without losing creativity, taste, or relevance. The consensus: AI should multiply human creativity, not replace it—and the organizations that will win are those that master workflow, rapid execution, and the ever-moving balance between scale and substance.

---

Transcript

[Podcast Host Benjamin Shapiro]

The Martech 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.

[Brendan Ferdinand]

From advertising to software as a service to data across all of our programs and clients, we've seen a 55 to 65% open rate. Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs better than TV advertising.

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

Typical lifespan of an article is about 24 to 36 hours. We're reaching out to the right person

[Brendan Ferdinand]

with the right message and a clear call to action. Then it's just a matter of timing.

[Podcast Host Benjamin Shapiro]

Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world class marketers that you use technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's the host of the Martech podcast, Benjamin Shapiro

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

91% 91% of marketing teams are using AI who the heck is the one out of the 11 teams that isn't using AI? At this point, the question is no longer whether AI belongs in marketing anymore, it's whether your team knows how to effect effectively use it to produce great marketing campaigns. The bottleneck used to be campaign creation. Now it's launching campaigns people actually care about that they feel like are relevant to them. The definition of a campaign has changed to be something that's always on, always moving, always updating, always relevant and specific to the person you're talking about. So what does the AI native marketing campaign actually look like today? And where should humans stay in the loop? I'm Benjamin Shapiro and today I'm talking with Brendan Ferdinand, the co founder and chief evangelist at Knack. Brendan spent the past year talking with more than 100 enterprise marketing teams, including OpenAI, Google, Stripe and ATT, to understand where AI helps, where it breaks, and what separates companies experimenting with AI from the ones that are actually shipping better marketing. And today, Brendan's going to explain how marketing campaigns should function in the AI era.

[Sponsor Voiceover / Announcer]

Today's interview is brought to you by Shift Paradigm. Marketing today is buried in complexity. You've got the tech, you've got the tools. But moving the needle feels harder than ever. And the last thing us marketers need is another consultant pitching digital transformation.

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

Enter Shift.

[Sponsor Voiceover / Announcer]

Paradigm Shift is an integrated team of experts who help enterprise brands turn complexity into traction. Their work is insight led and strategically grounded, designed not to sell you a service or a piece of tech, but to actually solve real Business challenges. What makes them different? Well, they're AI enabled but not AI dependent. They're human first, but plugged into the latest tools and models and the moments those models need to go through to prove themselves. They get techy without losing sight of the real person behind every click. And they don't just hand you a deck. They build the blueprints and stay to develop, deploy and run the engine. Growth isn't one size fits all. So stop settling for strategies that collect dust and start working with a team that actually builds for you. Visit ShiftParadigm.com to see how they can help you connect meaningfully with your audience. That's ShiftParadigm.com Brandon welcome to the Martech podcast.

[Brendan Ferdinand]

Thank you so much for having me.

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

Excited to be here, excited to have you on the show and excited to learn a little bit about what a marketing campaign really looks like today. Before AI, what did launching an enterprise marketing campaign look like as a benchmark?

[Brendan Ferdinand]

Yeah, that's a, that's a great question. I, I, I can answer that from personal experience because I, my, I spent my entire career as a, as an enterprise marketer and you know, in a couple of different jobs that it varied but it was very difficult. Right? You would either get tasked with, hey, we need to build a campaign around this product or around this topic or theme in the market and you go ahead and decide to go and build that campaign but you have to actually work with like 20 other people, including developers and technical people. You have to use 10 to 12 different tools along the way to get things built and, or you have to ship that off to an external agency and get handed things back and go back and forth with them a hundred times and get more budget and you know, all this kind of stuff. Either way it was, it was tough as a marketer to build those campaigns and actually do the marketing that I always wanted to do as as a marketer.

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

I feel like with campaigns there's this tension between having your always on marketing programs and then hey, we want to do something special that's relevant, that's right now. And so it's sort of the, you know, I think of it as like a consumable as opposed to infrastructure. Right. We're setting up something that is just always sourcing right people and sending the same message over time or this is what's hot and relevant right now. In the old world with marketing campaigns it feels like you really had to want it to do something that was like a one off. It had to be special. Now we have AI. How has it changed the thinking about what a marketing campaign is?

[Brendan Ferdinand]

Yeah, well, look, I think, you know, today in the age of AI, you know, organizations are kind of a lot less hamstrung by a lot of things. Right. Number one, they're less hamstrung by technology. They're less hamstrung by the limitations of, you know, what they're able to, you know, to produce and their throughput. And they're also less limited by the number of ideas that they have to pick and choose from to actually, you know, get to their audiences. Right. They can actually do more. So, yeah, I think it actually opens up a bit of a new world now for organizations who are really embracing AI in their workflows and they're able to kind of unlock a lot of things, right. They can go from all of those ideas, which was never the problem, right? The problem was never we don't have enough ideas.

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

There's.

[Brendan Ferdinand]

Everyone has so many ideas. But getting those ideas to the audience was always the challenge. Right. And now by embedding AI into your workflow, you can unlock so many things and it kind of can change the way that your marketing team works because now all of those ideas are possible to actually like execute on. Right. Which that was obviously wasn't the case in the, in, in the past. So, yeah, pretty exciting time.

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

The, the lid is off the pickle jar. At least that's how I explain it to my kids. Yeah, that's right. It used to be it's so hard to do these marketing campaigns. We're never going to get around it. Yes, we should be, you know, now talking about the World cup and whatever's next Back to School is coming and do something around the holidays. And if you're in marketing talking about cans and event based stuff and we would never do them because it was too hard. And then the duration of them. Now we have the opposite problem. You can in theory spin up a marketing campaign every day if you have enough AI and infrastructure. You said something that was interesting to me in our planning call that the challenge isn't producing more campaigns. You know, how are people not just squeezing all the toothpaste out of the tube and getting it all over the kitchen sink? How are marketers, are they struggling with restricting the amount of campaigns they're working? And how do you find the balance of what should get left on the cutting room floor and what should actually get into the movie?

[Brendan Ferdinand]

Yeah, totally. And look, I think there's, there's a couple things there. You know, number one, now that the lid is off the pickle jar. How many pickles can you eat in one sitting?

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

Is real question right now, for the record, you have to work in all 17 of the metaphors that I just worked into this question. So you covered pickle jar. Now you got toothpastes and movies. Go on.

[Brendan Ferdinand]

I got. I. I'm working through them.

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

This is. Okay. Yeah, it's gonna be, how many pickles can you eat? There's only so much marketing people want to see from you.

[Brendan Ferdinand]

Exactly. Right.

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

So.

[Brendan Ferdinand]

So a lot of organizations, I would say just number one on volume. A lot of organizations are not doing the volume that they want to do or that they should do, you know, already, right. Because again, some of those challenges that. That existed before AI right. Throughput was hard, you know, so they. They would settle on like, okay, we're going to do our top five.

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

And.

[Brendan Ferdinand]

And that's all the time and resources we have to do. So, you know, now you can get to the right amount of pickles, right, that you want to get to or that your audience can consume. Right. I think that's number one. So, you know, that's good. You can increase. You can increase volume now, but, you know, again, that doesn't mean you should be sending everyone a message every hour. Right.

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

How do you figure that out, though? How do you figure out? You sure. Infinite pickles for. All, right. Infinite marketing campaigns for everyone. But how do you figure out the saturation point for your audience?

[Brendan Ferdinand]

Yeah, that's. That's a great question. I think, to me, I mean, you get. Probably get marketed to a lot. I also do as well. You know, I think the number one indicator is engagement. Right. Is your audience continuing to engage with your content? You know, are you giving them relevant things that they want to look at and consume? I think engagement, especially in the age of AI, is king. And we'll continue to see that kind of increase over the next number of years. I believe so. Yeah. I think it takes some testing right there. You have to maybe feed some of your audience a few more pickles than they're used to eating before you realize, okay, this is the right amount of pickles, you know, for us to. To, you know, take out of the pickle jar.

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

We're really stretching out the pickles. Yeah. Let's move on to toothpaste. All right, so you've. You're. You're figuring out how many campaigns you should launch by looking at the engagement rate. I mean, that kind of creates a little bit of a problem, because if the campaigns just aren't great. It's not a volume thing, it's a quality thing. How do you figure out, other than like, generally, is it a saturation problem? Is it a quality problem? How do you make something good?

[Brendan Ferdinand]

Yeah.

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

And who's doing it? Like, give me some examples.

[Brendan Ferdinand]

Yeah, that's. Yeah, it's a good question. So I, I think personalization is really important, especially today in the age of AI. I think, you know, the other thing that the, you know, the lid off the pickle jar, you know, scenario has done now for us is is it actually inside that pickle jar are different flavors of pickles? Right. And you're actually able to send and communicate with people in the way that they want to be communicated with. Right. And so I think that's another big piece is being able to personalize and tailor content specifically to your audiences. That's something else that has really been unlocked today. So having that relevance, the time to market, like we talked about, you know, being timely with your messages around things that are happening in market or that are relevant to your audience is now possible. And having the infrastructure set up to actually be able to capitalize on both of those things. So get your volume to where it should be testing in order to do that, but then also understanding your audiences and what they want to hear from you in a kind of personalized or highly personalized way.

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

There's a bulleted list here. Is it relevant? Is it interesting to my audience? Is it timely? Is it personalized? Does it have enough scale that it is worth executing? Those seem to be the five factors you just listed.

[Brendan Ferdinand]

Yeah, absolutely. And I think all five of those were not things that historically enterprises were able to even pick off. They would actually maybe select one or two of those and again, hamstrung by bandwidth or time or technical feasibility. Right. And so now you have access to all five of them. And how do you build AI correctly into your infrastructure and build your workflow around being able to kind of capitalize on all five of those?

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

It's easy to say AI is just going to fix all the problems. We're just going to wipe it over everything and AI wash all of our problems away. The reality is AI doesn't solve every problem. So where, when you're starting to think more about being able to execute campaigns as opposed to always on marketing, where does AI still break down?

[Brendan Ferdinand]

Yeah, look, I think, you know, as we all experiment with AI right now, I think there's, there's a lot of, of discussion in the market about, you know, what is the right level of, you know, automation of AI. And you know, where, you know, to your point earlier, maybe, you know, where are humans valuable here in this, you know, in the process. And I, I think for, you know, what, what, what I'm hearing from, you know, all the companies that I'm talking to is including OpenAI is, is a great example, right? They have built their workflow in such a way where they're, they're looking to maximize throughput. Of course they want to ensure that their marketers can get all of their IDE to their audiences in a, you know, very streamlined way, right? But what they do not want to lose, and I've heard this multiple times from the team at OpenAI, is they do not want to lose the taste in their marketing. They can't live without a human touch on every campaign that they do. They really don't want to put kind of, you know, quote unquote, AI slop out into the market and into the hands of their audience. They just don't. And so they, they purposefully, very deliberately involve their marketers at specific steps in their workflow when they're creating campaigns so that they can ensure that they retain that human element, that taste that AI just doesn't have.

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

Today I'm smiling a little bit because there's two words that always pop up, taste and judgment. And taste and judgment are the new democratization in the sense of like, that's the words people are saying to mean, you know, used to be bring it to the masses. But AI, the big problem is human in the loops. And you mentioned OpenAI. Talk to me a little bit about how companies like OpenAI think about their campaign structure and where are the human in the loop? Checkpoints.

[Brendan Ferdinand]

Yeah, absolutely. So OpenAI, you can imagine at one of the fastest growing companies on earth, they are, they're moving really fast, right? Things change all the time. Internally, things are always moving. There's a lot happening. So what the marketing operations team behind the scenes there at OpenAI, what they want to do is they want to arm their marketers with the tools to do the things that they need to do, where they want to do them. So the marketers at OpenAI, they work in Slack. That is where they work. So the entire process for creating a campaign at OpenAI starts in Slack. And in Slack, what they do is they actually just write a Slack message in a Slack channel. It's unstructured kind of thing. It's not like a structured brief or anything like that. The marketer says, hey, here's I'm Describing the campaign that I need. We're launching this new product or feature. I want to talk to this audience. I want to do it, you know, in this time frame, that kind of thing. And it's just a sometimes a very small structured message in Slack. And that actually kicks off a whole process with agents where an agent will come in and work with the marketer in Slack back and forth to say, hey, that's great, you want to do that campaign, but I need to know a few other pieces of information. And here's what I need to know. And what the agent is doing with the marketer is it is actually writing up a structured campaign brief, right? The marketer's not doing it knowingly, but the agent is pulling all the information out of the marketer in a very casual way. And it's populating a brief into a tool called Linear, which is actually like a commercial kind of a ticketing project management platform. And so the agent is pulling all that information it's populating into a tool. And then what happens is they have another agent that comes in once that brief is complete, and it starts pulling out all the details out of the structured brief in Linear, and it actually calls other platforms to get those campaign assets actually created. So in our case, it will take all of the relevant information about the email or landing page in the campaign, and it will pass that through into our NAC MCP, which then generates their campaign from there. And what OpenAI does at that point, once the campaign, the on brand campaign, campaign assets are built, then they drop the marketer back into our platform and again it's linked right from Slack. So in that same Slack thread with their agent that they were unknowingly building a brief with, they can just click and view what's been generated by AI, and they can go in and tweak and perfect add taste, you know, if it's not there yet, and all that kind of stuff, and then kind of go through the process from there.

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

So just to read back, what I'm hearing is there is a concept, right? And then there is a brief development agent that is helping take that concept and formalizing all the information to make a brief that then can be executed by another agent. And you mentioned the tool Linear is sort of helping with the ticketing. And then once that is essentially created into a brief, it sounds like it's handed to nac, where the brief is actually created. And then there's a human in the loop to evaluate and decide on whether to be pushed or not. Help me understand the sort of separation between linear, this ticketing system and what NAC is actually doing to create the brief. Like if I want to create a television campaign, can I do that or is it just display? What is NAC sort of capable of in the sense of creating the brief? Not the brief, the actual campaign that the person then evaluates in Cubase.

[Brendan Ferdinand]

Yeah. And so basically that's kind of the infrastructure that a lot of our customers are looking to set up in different ways. And I could describe to you a few other workflows that are kind of different than that. But yeah, what they, what, what enterprises need is a place where their campaign assets, emails, landing pages, sms, RCS messages and assets in other channels, they need to be created and generated in a production ready way. Right. And that's something that AI alone can't do. And that's why that agent is taking all of those details and passing it into our platform. So it's actually generating, for OpenAI, it's generating emails and landing pages which are kind of the core of all their digital campaigns. And we are now doing SMS and RCS messages and other channels in the future in our platform. So that's kind of the idea. Does that make sense?

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

Yeah, no, absolutely. I think that what I'm hearing from you is KNACK is housing the creative assets across multiple different channels. One is what is being pushed out to the users, where are we driving them? And then there's the interaction on the website which captures the demand or whatever the call to action is. When you think about, you know, I think the traditional, maybe it's just me, I think of a marketing campaign as like this flashy, splashy thing. And a lot of it was like, I'm running a campaign, it's going to be a TV commercial, you know, or I'm going to do an event, you know, like we're going to do guerrilla marketing as opposed to just like there. Here is a specific campaign that is all digital for people that are thinking about campaigns that are not purely just digital, but sort of having other formats of media or something that's a real world experience. Do you have any experience in helping do that and what's the process there?

[Brendan Ferdinand]

Yeah, I mean, I think in that world creativity is number one. Right. And that's something that to me, you know, and for us, I think at Knack all we're all marketers here, you know, that is, that is something that, that we believe is, is, is what humans are best at. Right. And marketers, that is kind of their, their job to, to Come up with those amazing ideas. And you know, that's of course with the help of AI these days. And I think the other thing I would say around that is every campaign now is digital, right? If you do a guerrilla campaign, a guerrilla marketing campaign or you know, billboards or a TV ad or whatever, it's like the next step is always digital, right? Like hey, go to this website, jump onto this landing page, you know, sign up for more information, those kinds of things, right? They do kind of coalesce around a digital kind of nucleus, right? And so whether you're doing a digital campaign or a non digital, like traditional or live campaign, they are, they're all digital at some point, right?

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

Where has the friction disappeared in the campaign creation process and where does it still exist?

[Brendan Ferdinand]

Yeah, good question. I, I think today there is, there is still friction in some areas of campaign production and execution. And, and to, I would say that, you know, a lot of organizations still have a lot of technology, a lot of processes that are set up around, you know, the, the shortcomings of kind of older technology, older you know, processes and teams and skill sets of marketers. One of the things that we're talking a lot about right now with enterprise companies is what does a modern marketer look like, right? And what can they do and how do we reduce that friction? And I think that's kind of the, the future. I think that a lot of organizations, you know, are, are, are grappling with right now is what if a marketer, you know, every marketer at our organization could be a full stack marketer, right? And full stack marketing means, you know, they can do all steps of the process themselves, right? When, when they're enabled properly with technology and the right process, every marketer can do every step of creating, producing, you know, basically going to market with their campaigns and that changes a lot of things. And you know, today there is still is friction in a lot of organizations, processes and systems because they just aren't set up the way that, you know, modern organizations could be to have no friction and to kind of let those full stack marketers really run right? Historically, you know, marketers are, have typically been kind of more T shaped, right? Where they are kind of have a little bit of knowledge about a lot of different things but then are specialized in one, they have deep knowledge in one area that's now changing, right? Every marketer now is more of like a square shaped marketer. They, they, they, you know, you're making

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

it sound like we're getting fat.

[Brendan Ferdinand]

Yeah, that's, yeah, that's great.

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

Well, we, we can talk sort of oval and that's kind of pear shaped

[Brendan Ferdinand]

and we'll talk about marketing nutrition a little later. But yeah, that, that's, that's kind of the idea is that now marketers, with the technology and, and workflows, you know, set up properly, marketers can be, every marketer can be full stack and, and, and yeah, I think that's kind of like a new world for folks in a lot of enterprises especially.

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

I want to get a little tactical for a second here and give everybody something that they can take home with them to do differently today. So if I'm running a marketing department, I'm a, you know, a new cmo. Just started the organization today and it hasn't been very campaign focused. I've got 12 months before my seat, my seat starts to get hot. What should I be implementing today to make sure that my company can start to produce effective campaigns at the right scale?

[Brendan Ferdinand]

If I was walking in the door, you know, today at a new enterprise organization leading marketing, I think I would take a really hard look at how like the mechanics of how we go to market. Right. How do we go from idea and what are the steps that it takes today for us to get that idea into the hands of our audience. And you know, when you look at a, like a factory production line, there, there's something called, in the, you know, kind of factory or manufacturing industry, there's something called goldrad's theory. Have you ever heard of this?

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

No. What's Gold Red? Who's Gold Red?

[Brendan Ferdinand]

Gold R. So there's, he wrote a book called the Goal.

[Sponsor Voiceover / Announcer]

Uhhuh.

[Brendan Ferdinand]

And basically it, it talks all about manufacturing production lines and, and how they kind of are, are modernized and, and, and you know, and work better in today's world. And the theory that he has is that every production line has exactly one constraint, not two or three. They have one. And when you actually take a look at that, all the processes that go in your or that are in your production line, you need to solve for the one constraint. And once you solve for the one constraint, you will unlock a new world of throughput. And throughput isn't just making more things like we've talked about, you know, in the past. It's, it's about actually getting the right things like the right products produced and into the hands of your customer. Right. When we talk about throughput, it's not just like making more products in a factory and piling, piling up in the, you know, in the storeroom. Right. It's, it's actually about getting them all the way into the customer's hands. And I think that's something that I would look at as a very first thing is what is my team doing to get those incredible ideas that they have and amazing innovations that we're doing in our products? How are we getting those into the hands of the audiences that are meaningful to those things? Right. And finding that constraint and solving the, for the constraint so that we can actually, you know, build, build better things for our customers, do amazing marketing.

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

What's interesting to me that I'm hearing from you, you know, over the last decade, two decades, marketing has gone more from being a creative pursuit to more of a function built on sort of mathematics and data engineering. And don't get me wrong, data engineering and, and, and understanding your data and manipulating it is still incredibly important. But what you said that I think really sticks out is marketers need to think more like factories, like manufacturing. The first thing that they should do when they're starting to think about their campaigns is understand throughput. What is the process? So you're starting with a process evaluation of how we launch campaigns and you're understanding what the frictions or the bottlenecks are to stop you from getting something not just to your customers, but getting something that is great to your customers. And then once you identify what your processes are, you could figure out where your bottlenecks are and you could start to work on the discrete process. And so, you know, fundamentally we think of campaigns as being these one off things. We're going to do something special and we're going to do it once and we're going to hope it works, but we can't really repeat it. And that might actually be the wrong mindset. We need to start thinking about how do we consistently produce campaigns as opposed to how do we do this campaign once. And to me, that is the biggest mind shift of now that we can produce more than we've ever produced. What should we produce, how do we produce it and how do we evaluate whether it is efficient or not?

[Brendan Ferdinand]

Yeah, absolutely. And I think I would say marketing is, is about creativity and connecting with people. But you can't do that if you have like a very, you know, you have a constraint in your process, or you have an inefficient process, or you can't get to market in less than six weeks. Right. You know, one of our customers is an organization called YouTube. You've probably heard of them.

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

I've heard of them, yes, once or twice.

[Brendan Ferdinand]

Yeah, they they actually, they talk a lot about speed to market because when they're promoting something that they want their audiences to watch on their platform, there's a lot of streaming platforms out there now, right? And so they, they say like, every minute counts, right? When the game before the super bowl ends and they want to start promoting to their audience for folks to watch the super bowl on their platform. They say like literally hours, minutes count when, when we want to promote who's in the final game in the super bowl and little things that happened in the previous game. They want to add those pieces of content into their, you know, again, to make it very relevant, timely to their audience. Those getting those in the hands of their audience faster, like within minutes or hours of the game, prior ending, meaning mean like literally millions more people watching on their platform.

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

I think for everyone that's still listening, the big takeaway here is you need to stop thinking about how do I produce this campaign? And you need to start thinking about how do I produce campaigns? And that's the mind shift set that we're going to. Campaigns are not one off. It is something that you're always working on what is your next campaign so you can be timely, so you could be personalized, so you can be relevant. Because as marketers are starting to be able to ship more inherently, there will be more slop and you're only going to be able to stick out if you are timely, relevant, personalized in what's happening in the real world today. Brendan, I want to move on to our lightning round where I'm going to ask you a couple of questions about marketing ops and a little bit about your career and some other fun stuff. Are you ready?

[Brendan Ferdinand]

I am so ready.

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

All right, here we go. What is the one AI tool every marketing team should be experimenting with right now?

[Brendan Ferdinand]

I think the one tool you should be experimenting with is the tool that you're already using. You're probably actually 91% of you are already using ChatGPT, you're using Claude, you're using, you know, whatever it is, you need to lean into that. If you're just asking ChatGPT a couple of questions every day about content or something, that's not enough, Right. Embedding those powerful tools into your workflow for how you go to market every day is so important. And experimenting with that and allowing yourself to experiment with your audience so that you can figure out the right number of pickles to take out of the jar, right?

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

Yep.

[Brendan Ferdinand]

Really important.

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

You can't have too many pickles as we've discussed previously. My answer is very similar to yours. Coding agents, whether it is Claude code, whether it is Codex, I don't Grox new doesn't matter. Make the shift. Build your own infrastructure. Move away from using artificial intelligence like Google as an answer engine and start using it to build your own personal workflows. It is the future and the sooner you get started, the less likely you are to be left behind. Okay, next question. You recently launched Nax MCP server. Why let AI agents use your platform instead of forcing marketers into your ui?

[Brendan Ferdinand]

You know what, that's a great, that's a great question. Why would we allow agents to use our platform instead of forcing marketers to use the the ui? Well two, I have two answers to that. The first is the UI isn't the product. Right?

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

Okay.

[Brendan Ferdinand]

What the product is, what we're offering our customers or enterprises all over the world is the ability to do incredible marketing. That's what we're offering our customers. And we want to be able to do that in a very like we've talked about a very efficient way that something that doesn't take weeks or months or you know, days even to, to go, to get to market, to get those ideas to market. And so we want to make that quick and easy for, for everyone whether you're a human doing all the steps yourself. And that's why we spent the last 10 years building a world class UI or you're an agent. We want to be very agent friendly and I think that gets me to my second point is we want to be the most agent and AI friendly platform for all of our customers. That is what every AI forward company is looking for right now is tools and platforms that are extremely AI friendly and can interact with agents and or humans alike.

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

Very noble of you. It would scare the crap out of me. Moving from A. Most SaaS companies have been seat based and you know, whether somebody uses the tool or not, we kind of know what our revenue is. And now all of a sudden we're moving into this sort of token more usage based type environment. Sure we want to bring marketing creativity to everyone, but it's a fundamental change in sort of how the business operates. Just quickly, how do you think about making that shift from a business perspective? Not necessarily just a customer adoption perspective.

[Brendan Ferdinand]

Yeah, I mean you do need to be willing to change right there. A lot of our customers are looking into the future and things do look very different in the way that their workflow happens but also how they use tools. A lot of them are using a Lot of their kind of existing marketing platforms as long as they're AI friendly kind of in a headless way now. And that does change how they think about the value equation and how their licensing is done and pricing is done. And you know, our, our goal is to just be easy to work with and you know, work with our customers on how they, how they want to work with with platforms and you know, trying to drive the most value for them that we can in, in the AI world today.

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

So it's a confusing time. I work with a data vendor who I've got, I think it's like a $200 a month license to do research for a podcast production company and they launched an API and an MCP server and now they've got a usage based pricing and they give a couple of free tokens and I went from a $200 a month spend to just using their free tokens because I don't use it all that much. And I'm like, how does any of this make good business sense for them? And eventually we'll scale and we'll use it more and hopefully it will work out. But I think that a lot of companies are facing this problem of predictable sustainable revenue to, I don't know, I hope you use this thing. Yeah, scary times a little bit.

[Brendan Ferdinand]

For sure. For sure. And I think though, you know, the good news for, for marketing is like I mentioned earlier, I think the, the volume and the, the quality and you know, the, the personalized experiences that aren't happening today are going to be unlocked now. Right. And that's the, the, the beauty. You know, that's where we're really leaning in is we, we think we're going to actually be more valuable in this new world than, than less so.

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

Okay, you've spoken at Adobe Summit, Salesforce Connections, the Martech conference, some pretty notable speaking opportunities. What's the one mistake that you've seen that conference speakers make that they can avoid?

[Brendan Ferdinand]

Yeah, too many dad jokes probably no such thing. Right, you're right. There's, that's, you're talking to the wrong guy about that. But yeah, no, I, I think the worst thing that I see and, and look, I, I've, I've, I've, I'm, I've been guilty of it is, is definitely, you know, doing a full on sales pitch in front of your audience. I think that can be cringy at best and I, I try to avoid doing that. I really work when I, you know, get up on stage. I want to make sure that whatever I'm saying. Or whatever my guest speaker is saying as well, is. Is really relevant to people, and they can actually bring something back with them, you know, that is useful to their organization. I think that's, like, my biggest focus now. So. Yeah, I think the worst part is, you know, you walk out of a. Of a conference session going like, oh, my gosh, they're just pitching their.

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

Their.

[Brendan Ferdinand]

Their tool from top to bottom. And I was just watching their roadmap presentation the whole time. That's no fun.

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

Knock, knock. Who's. Who's there? Interrupting cow.

[Brendan Ferdinand]

Interrupting moo.

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

There's no such thing as too many dad jokes. Oh, no. All right, on that note, you've got five kids. What does parenting taught you about leading marketing teams?

[Brendan Ferdinand]

Yelling doesn't work. I'm just kidding.

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

Really?

[Brendan Ferdinand]

Yeah, it does.

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

What? It's a tool in the toolbox.

[Brendan Ferdinand]

Joking.

[Podcast Host Benjamin Shapiro]

No.

[Brendan Ferdinand]

Yeah, always.

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

Yelling doesn't work. Yelling infrequently is necessary. It's. Let's be realistic here.

[Brendan Ferdinand]

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But no, I. I'm. I. I do think the biggest thing with. With kids is realizing that no one kid is the same as the other. They're all. You connect with them in very different ways, and they need different things from you. And I think it's. It's the same in marketing teams. I think everybody has skills and. And, you know, are. Are really useful in. In different ways. And. And I think, you know, making sure that everybody is oriented in. In the places where they want to be and doing their best work is really gonna, you know, touch your audience in the best way. Right. That's. That's, you know, putting everyone in the right spots in the organization is.

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

Is number one in the Shapiro household. Things don't function very well if we don't have Dino Nuggets on hand or Mac and cheese. What are the Dino Nuggets and Mac and Cheese for marketing teams?

[Brendan Ferdinand]

Oh, man. Oh. I think space to be creative. Number one. That's the Dino Nuggets.

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

Good answer.

[Brendan Ferdinand]

Go give them space to be creative. Do that. That's where the best work is done. And then I think the Mac and cheese. Or we call it KD Kraft Dinner.

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

Yeah, right, sure.

[Brendan Ferdinand]

That's. I think that part is actually the experimentation part. Right. Letting them experiment, run. So be creative. Yes, but test things. Test everything.

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

I would have said clean data, but we're going down the same path. Okay, last question for you. What's one marketing workflow you think disappears completely over the next three years?

[Brendan Ferdinand]

Any handoff to a technical person or technical Part of the process, I think will be gone in the next three years. I think it's, you know, a lot of organizations that I'm seeing, it's already been eradicated. But, you know, if I, if you look at, you know, marketers, what you hire them for, they are hired to be creative, to do amazing marketing campaigns, to make an impact on the audience, that, that is meaningful to your products and, and that doesn't involve any technical work. Right. That, like, nothing in that job description is like, hey, you should have to know HTML or ampscript or how to, you know, manipulate a giant marketing automation platform. That's over complicated. You know, those, those things will all be gone very soon, I believe. Yeah. And, and, and let alone developers, a lot of, A lot of enterprises that we bump into are, Are still, still have developers, you know, working with marketers and all that kind of thing. And I think that will be completely gone in the next three years.

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

I was really hoping you'd say untargeted, cold, outbound emails, but I don't think that's going away any.

[Brendan Ferdinand]

I wish. We all wish.

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

All right, Brendan, I appreciate you coming on, telling us a little bit about marketing campaigns and sharing your knowledge and, oh, my God, you have five kids. You go get some rest, man.

[Brendan Ferdinand]

Thank you. I gotta go open the pickle jar at home.

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

There you go. All right, that wraps up this episode of the Martech podcast. Thanks to Brendan Ferdinand, the co founder and chief evangelist at Knack, for joining us.

[Sponsor Voiceover / Announcer]

A special thanks to Shift Paradigm for sponsoring this podcast. Shift is an integrated team of experts who help enterprise brands bridge the gap between strategy, data and customers. Human first, AI enabled and execution led. They build the blueprints, then stay to develop, deploy, and run the engine you need. So stop settling for decks that collect dust and start working with a team that actually builds for you. Visit ShiftParadigm.com to see how they can help you connect meaningfully with your audience.

[Podcast Co-host or Interviewer]

If you'd like to contact Brendan, you could find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes or on martechpod.com or you can visit his company's website, which is knack.com k n a k dot com. If you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app or Visit us on YouTube and we'll be back in your feed every week. All right, that's it for today, but until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers. Happy.

[Brendan Ferdinand]

Foreign.

[Podcast Host Benjamin Shapiro]

Thanks for listening to the Martech podcast and I hear everything. Production Looking to launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand? Then visit iheareverything.com.