← MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth
MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth
Marketing innovation in the AI era
00:34:55
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- [00:00]
Podcast Announcer
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.
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Benjamin Shapiro
From advertising to software as a service
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Chris O'Neill
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.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Typical lifespan of an article is about 24 to 36 hours.
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Chris O'Neill
We're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call to action. Then it's just a matter of timing.
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Podcast Announcer
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 technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's the host of the Martech podcast, Benjamin Shapiro
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Benjamin Shapiro
10% Most companies use about 10% of their martech stack capabilities, according to McKenzie. Why are marketers constantly overpaying for technology solutions? It's not because we're lazy. It's because our workflows traditionally have been slow, fragmented and manual. And in the age of agentic AI, our tech is evolving faster and faster. The possibilities for and the complexities of an effective marketing program are growing exponentially. But the foundations of our stacks haven't changed. We all have a CRM, a CDP, a CMS, all of the TLAs. The question isn't what else do I need to change the foundation of my stack, it's how can I leverage what I have to do more, better and faster before everything changes again. Ben I'm Benjamin Shapiro and joining me today is Chris O', Neill, the CEO of GrowthLoop, which is an agentic compostable CDP that automates marketing cycles to build a compounding marketing engine. And today Chris is going to explain how the best marketers are bringing intelligence to the data to stay ahead of the pace of change. Time for a short break to hear
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Sponsor Voice
from our sponsor, Scrunch. When was the last time you actually visited a website to research something for me? AI does all that work now. So if AI is doing the discovery research and deciding who or what is your brand's website really for the rise of AI bots becoming as important as new visitors is a massive change in user behavior. And that's what Scrunch is taking head on. Scrunch is the AI customer experience platform that helps marketing teams understand how AI agents experience their site they tell you how your brand shows up in LLM results, where it doesn't, and what's preventing your content from being retrieved, trusted or recommended. It's not just visibility. Scrunch shows you the content gaps, citation gaps, and how to fix the technical blockers that matter so your brand is found and chosen in AI answers. Face it, your most important site visitor isn't human anymore. It's the AI deciding what gets surfaced. And for Martech podcast listeners, Scrunch is providing a free website diagnostic that uncovers how AI sees your site, where you have content gaps and where you're showing up versus your competition. To see how LLMs evaluate your site, go to scrunch.com martech that's scrunch S C-R-U-N-C-H.com martech Chris, welcome to the Martech podcast.
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Chris O'Neill
Great to be here, Benjamin. Looking forward to our conversation.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Excited to have you on the show. Excited to not only meet a board member of the company that my wife works for, we live in the same town. And also you're a great expert in marketing and understand sort of the pace of change that's happening in marketing. You've seen a lot of different technology shifts and worked with AI back when it was called ML. Talk to me a little bit about what you're seeing in terms of the pace of innovation and how is this technology change affecting marketers? Why is it different than what we've seen before?
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Chris O'Neill
Yeah, I think, yeah, I've seen lots of different errors. I think that just means I'm getting old. But in terms of the technology change and its translation to marketing, this is bigger than all the others. There's a reason there's so much hype and it's progressing much faster. So you talk about AI is just this compounding force and the defining technology shift of our lifetime for sure. And you really think about it, it builds upon many of the others. Right, so desktop to mobile, the shift to the cloud. Right. The applications of course, are built on the cloud. So these applications which are fundamentally changing workflows and changing pretty much every aspect of business and increasingly our lives is actually built on the previous generations of technology shifts. When I talk about the pace changing, the slope is unbelievable. If you think back, there's been three big step changes in the last, like, I don't know, three to four years. Of course we have the ChatGPT moment which was really about knowledge and pre training. That was, I think somewhere Back in 2022, the next big step was reasoning, sorry, at the inference time compute. So you know, just thinking in real time and at inference in roughly two years later and of course all the nerds huddled over the holidays because iteration this long horizon reasoning and agents really the breakthrough of course with cloud code and now it's called cloud cowork has really fundamentally changed another leap forward in terms of how we can think system wide. It's a tool that understands a system and understands intent and the consequences, not just like the syntax itself. So you put all these together and we're seeing both fundamental change at a pace we've never really seen before. So it's exciting and unnerving at the same time.
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Benjamin Shapiro
I think of this as the judgment era and you sort of referred to it as Claude code or agentic AI understanding systems. You've made this claim on the company has made its claim on the website, essentially that you want to bring intelligence to data, not the other way around. Tell us a little bit about what that means.
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Chris O'Neill
Yeah, I think it's pretty clear at this stage early on you needed to bring data to tools because the tool itself would need the understanding, the intelligence in order to fuel a specific task. When you start to think about systems end to end systems, and you start to also look at the fundamental assumption which is proving to be really clear is that data clouds, data lakes, data warehouses, whatever the heck you want to call them, are a foundational element for, not just for marketing, but for most functions inside of a company. So you see the rise of originally AWS, Google, BigQuery, Snowflake, Databricks, except et cetera. It's pretty obvious that that's actually where the data is a foundational element to everything. So when you think about bringing the intelligence to the data, as opposed to the other way around, it's superior in so many ways. It makes sense from a cost perspective. You're not moving data all over the place unnecessarily. From a security and a governance perspective, of course people want to protect their ip, protect their sensitive data, especially related to the customers. So doing so in data cloud or warehouses is a better way. And of course, last but certainly not least is the power of AI. AI requires context. That system wide thinking we were just discussing requires as much context as you can feed the agents. So for all those reasons, it's very obvious that the data clouds are going to continue to rise, have really grown very materially over the last five, six years and I don't see that stopping anytime soon. So therefore it's about how do you bring intelligence on top of the data bring humans into the loop to apply their creativity. And together data plus AI and human ingenuity I think is the formula for, certainly for marketing and most likely other functions within the company.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Yeah, I've sort of struggled with this concept of compostability and it sort of built into the definition of what your company is, a compostable cdp. And also, also with an agentic layer when you talk about bringing the intelligence to the data. Right. The AI can go through and see all of the data, but making sense of it seems like that's where the compostability piece comes in. Explain that in a little bit more detail.
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Chris O'Neill
Yeah, marketing sure does love acronyms and buzzwords and so forth. And you know, composability is really just a function of mixing and matching. Right. So it's not that you have to have everything all in one suite. Right. There's, there's legacy software that has long promised big things and frankly underdelivered. I think the notion of being able to bring together the best in class things to sit on top of a data class, really a concept of composability. But you mentioned the word compounding and I'm a big fan of that word. Einstein famously called compound interest.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Good, because it was going to be my next question.
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Chris O'Neill
Let's go there if we will. I'll just set it up and then we can build on it. But like compounding is such a powerful force in technology and nature and Einstein famously called it compound interest, the eighth wonder of the world. So from a young age I've always been fascinated by the notion of little things that compound over time that have a small effect to start and then lead to exponential gains. And we really think about that and I'm happy to unpack it in the light of how it guides our strategy product wise, but also just in general, what I think it can do for not only for marketing, but for businesses,
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Benjamin Shapiro
I think of compound. It's funny that you said compounding interest and, and it was Einstein. I was assuming it would have been somebody like J.P. morgan in a finance term.
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Podcast Announcer
Yeah.
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Benjamin Shapiro
But you know, when I think of compounding interest when it comes to marketing, my head goes towards content marketing. And then mostly what was traditional SEO strategies. No one became Internet famous by publishing one blog post. But if you continually post content, over time you start to build a reputation. Each individual piece of content gets more valuable and over time you've got this archive that you can really rely on and it's something you own. To me, that is what compounding marketing programs are how is the SEO is essentially going away now? How do you build a compounding marketing program if it's not in the content marketing landscape?
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Chris O'Neill
Yeah, that's a great example though in compounding is everywhere. When you start to think about it for a minute, I'll just expound on it because of course is most commonly used in the context of finance. Right. Interest compounds and grows. It's in nature, it's in technology. You think of a network, a network effect. Every node you add adds exponential amount of things. And James Clear talks about it in terms of personal habits. You get 1% better every day. The end of the year you're 16 times better at something. So it's just a very powerful thing. And really the simplest way to think about it is you know, really what are the different steps that go in to marketing or a life cycle? Right. Everything from okay, what's your business objective, who are you going to speak to, what journey are you going to take them on or across which channels, your own channels, your paid channels, et cetera. And then how can you learn what worked? Right. Activate your campaigns, usually what they call are called. You figure out what works, read it back into the data cloud itself. That's a repository not only for the data but or the results. And then you can lather, rinse and repeat. So the notion of compounding is like, you know, rather than having those siloed, both the data and the tools and the steps siloed across different teams and interactions that take a long time, you actually are all about getting through that entire loop as quickly as possible and not necessarily obsessing about getting things right the first first step, but learning and iterating and having a self reinforcing loop that is is self optimizing in many ways. So that's the concept in the simplest way. The way to think about it is how do you compress the notion of the timeline from an idea to impact as quickly as possible. So that's how we think about it. And our product is oriented to basically help marketers in this case and data teams. You get through an entire loop as opposed to the notion of the pass of like a funnel which has lots of friction and manual steps.
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Benjamin Shapiro
It's the concept of recursion or increased learning. Right. The more you can go through the cycle, the more understanding you have, the more efficient you can make it. And so built into that you mentioned is speed into learning how do you think about marketing changing and what are some of the ways that we can become faster, more iterative? Obviously the Pace of change is dizzying right now. It's something I think we're all struggling with.
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Chris O'Neill
Absolutely. I think we all are. But it is our new reality. So I'd say get over it, it's the first thing, and really jump in and get facile with the tools. But your point, what you're alluding to, I think is the longest poll in any change. It's really human change. Right. It's like, how do you get people more comfortable to start to think about not just applying old workflows to new tools? Right. When you think about the change, another reason why this change feels so fundamental. Most of the changes in marketing in the last several decades have been what I call demand side. What do I mean by that is, oh, we shifted from, you know, from desktop computers to mobile computers, we shifted from analog media to digital media, et cetera. Those are like demand side, meaning like how we as consumers demand like pulled information. And this one certainly has elements of that. But it's actually more a supply side, meaning the ways in which we orchestrate workflows. It has fundamentally changed. Right. We can do things, not just discrete things, but now we can do entire sequences and processes and workflows fundamentally different. So this is supply chain, sorry, supply side change. And that comes with it, fundamental human change to. So no, it's not only like, you move my cheese, it's like, holy crap, am I going to have a job? And like, how am I going to
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Benjamin Shapiro
pay for the cheese?
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Chris O'Neill
How are we going to pay for the cheese? So it's, it's really the longest pole. And you know, to me it's about not only jumping in and getting facile with the tools, tinkering on your own time. It's fundamentally about picking one workflow or picking one subset of your work end to end to show and learn from that area and then start to propagate it to other teams, other areas, other workflows, et cetera. So that tends to be the work we find to be most successful with some of the more modern, forward leaning brands in the world right now.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Yeah, you know, a friend of mine called me the other day and he's not in marketing, but he was kind of panicked and he was like, hey, I, I'm reading all these news stories, I'm reading the tea leaves. I'm in my mid-40s, I've, you know, I'm a functional area expert And I think AI is going to take my job in the next six to 18 months because that's what anthropic CEO said and I, you know, verbal vomited back the taglines. Everybody says, which is, you know, AI is not going to take your job. Somebody that uses AI is going to take your job. And you don't have to be faster than the bear, you have to be faster than the person next to you. When, when you actually start coaching people on how to go from these non technical roles. You know, and for marketers, some of us are creatives, right. Some of us are strategists, we're not technologists. A lot of us are, you know, how do you coach people on how to not only try to embrace that change is happening but actually have to, you know, learn a totally different skill. You have to be more technologically savvy.
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Chris O'Neill
Yes and no. I mean I'm jumping in in my spare time and learning cloud code and cowork and I would say what's, what's different about it? I mean I have, I, you know, learn how to, taught myself how to code when I was teeny tiny using basic playing with games back in the day. But I am by no means deeply technical. I think it just requires curiosity and some like resilience and persistence in a task. And the way I'm doing it is like if I ever get stuck in setting up a repo or whatever, you take a picture, upload it to Claude and it walks you through it. So you know, I think the unlock here is yes, for sure. It's fundamentally changed how we write code today. You know, the majority of code in our company and most, most companies that are, you know, forward leaning in technology are, are writing over half their code with, with, you know, with some version of cloud or, or whatever other tools they choose. So that's clear. And customer service is being reinvented but it, it, it doesn't just stop there. It really is into marketing, it is into, you know, not just writing, it's into finance, it's into the back offices of companies now and again. I don't think it is. I think people who sit back and wait and wonder will be the ones that will be most impacted. Right. The people who lean in and have some curiosity to learn and master these tools will be indispensable. I really fundamentally believe it. And there really aren't any excuses. Right. Take a picture. If you get stuck, upload it and it'll walk you through it. So it's just a fascinating time. Yes, it's, it's disruptive and I look people are going to lose their jobs like block announced their thing this last Week. You know, that could be as much as over hiring and some, maybe some acquisition that went a little sideways as much as anything. But you know, I think that's provoking a real question about the role of the compact that people have with their employer, the role that technology is going to play, how and where we're going to hire and so forth. But I don't think people will regret leaning into learning these tools and goodness, goodness, I'm having fun with them. So I don't know. Hopefully people can have a curiosity.
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Benjamin Shapiro
It is amazing what a non technical person can build these days.
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Chris O'Neill
Unbelievable.
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Benjamin Shapiro
And it is not just learning new skills, but also the way that the buyers behave has changed pretty dramatically. You've talked a lot about personalization for real. Talk to me about the change in the buyer experience and how do we craft better personalization?
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Chris O'Neill
Well, I won't get too far out and like put my tinfoil hat on and all this stuff. But like I do believe there's a world where agents will buy from agents. Let's put that aside because that's out there in ways. But we start, we need to start to think in that direction, but more closer to home. When I talk about personalization for reels, right? Really personalization has been so overhyped and under delivered and it largely starts in the realm of, you know, mass segmentation. So you have like these big segments and then you kind of target those segments and you have a message for those segments and so forth. And that's personalization. And I think that's not necessarily what I'm talking about. I'm talking about true one to one that says, hey, what do you know about me? With permission and how can you basically set up a series of interventions that are going to truly delight me, right? You know, what I've purchased in the past and you can sort of anticipate my needs or reasonably do so. And you know, the notion also is rooted in, you know, when you do mass segmentation you're looking for correlation, right? You're saying like these sort of things happen to correlate together and you have measures like return on ad spend and like you get these sort of proxy metrics to correlate, you know, importantly what you spend and what you sort of get in return. But ultimately personalization is the realm of are you actually understanding as much as you can about a prospect or a customer in finding ways to reasonably delight them, finding sets of things or interventions that can get causally linked to changes in value metrics that really matter? I look at Metrics like lifetime value. Right. The true combination of what the value of that relationship means over time. That means you're not just spamming your customers to get a return on an ad spend or you're trying to pump like more emails to get the incremental dollars up. So many brands do that to this day. And it's, it's the opposite of personalization, it's the opposite of delight. If you take a lifetime value view, you set a set up control test and control systems with AI. Now you can do these things. Right. We're really talking about decisioning at the individual level. And you can prove causal lift. That's the game. And that at the highest level, marketing and CMOs don't last very long because they don't speak the love language of the cfo, which is growth. You know, marketing is viewed as a cost center. It can't, you can't say with any degree of precision the return that you get. Right. In terms of lifetime value for the significant investments that are made. So, you know, I believe that's the higher order bit. How do we turn marketing into a growth engine as opposed to it being just merely viewed as a cost center?
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Benjamin Shapiro
Yeah, I appreciate the sense of personalization actually being personal and it being an organization talking to one person as opposed to the group of people. Because really what we've been doing is not personalization. It's been targeting.
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Chris O'Neill
Exactly.
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Benjamin Shapiro
And we've been using Personas and people in aggregate, not speaking to the individual. As marketing starts to evolve, we're thinking more about personalization. There's also this blend and change of the notion of the click going away. And lots of marketers are talking about leaning more into brand because that's actually what's defensible and that's what builds your reputation and, and essentially replaces your SEO with AEO because you have credibility. How do you think about how marketers should react to the fundamental shift of demand versus brand?
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Chris O'Neill
Yeah, it's a great one. And it is something that's happening slowly. It's actually, it's a little bit of like a pattern you see right. Slowly until it's not. It's sort of this asymptotic thing where you know, when you, when you look at what the proportion of traffic is going through aeo, it's very tiny right now, but it's compounding at a quick rate. It's growing. Okay.
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Benjamin Shapiro
But SEO is decreasing relatively rapidly.
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Chris O'Neill
SEO is for sure decreasing very rapidly.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Right.
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Chris O'Neill
So. But the message is, I'd say a couple things, right. I Think like investing in your brand, investing in upper funnel experience, getting really good at these iterative loops where there's always on measurement. These are the things you do to point the way to say, hey, how can you get even better to earn the right to be, you know, get a, get a referral, earn the right to be growing and thriving and creating a thriving community. I often talk about community led growth, right. A lot of, a lot of this word of mouth is going to be happening in the socials, in the Reddit. If you look at where the, where the agents are getting information is in there. So look, I think it's even more important to get the little things right, to lean into communities, to shape those communities in a positive and authentic way. Because that is, there's a premium for it always has been. But there's an even higher premium on word of mouth and like you can't astroturf this stuff, right? Your experiences at the personal level have to be good, like stop irritating me, start figuring out ways to add value in my life. So it's huge. It's the main game right now and it'll be fascinating to see which brands are agile enough to adapt to it.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Yeah, the pace of change has been pretty exhausting right now. And mostly I think there's a lot of anxiety for marketers about uncertainty of what used to, to be their compound growth engine. Right. I create more content, I get more brand, I get more clicks, I then can retarget and everything seems to go from there. And I'm supplementing with paid now we're okay. I'm going to do some brand marketing activities and hope that that generates some interest. Inherently that requires patience, trust, it's hard to measure. And this is kind of your area of expertise thinking about what activities that we're doing in marketing and how they're actually generating value when we're relying on something like brand, something that requires trust and time. How do you think about actually measuring whether value is coming out of that?
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Chris O'Neill
Yeah, I think you can measure brand, right? If you think of like it's always been a bit of a myth that like no, the brand is, it's the art side, you can't measure it. I mean there's an element of je ne sais quoi in the brand side that said when you do branded oriented things, a YouTube video, like what does it do? You can measure the search uplift, you can measure proxies downstream from that. So I, I just don't subscribe to the notion that, you know, that the brand is unmeasurable and performance is all about measuring everything. I think they actually can be measured. And then I think the actually that what I'm proposing, this notion of this, this causal decisioning that really does look at the constellation of things that you do and you actually have holdout groups to basically show the uplift. So that reflects the totality of your marketing message. So there are ways to do it. And all, all marketing is, is performance in my mind. Just you measure different things at different stages of, of the, of, of interactions with customers.
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Benjamin Shapiro
I feel like I've mentioned the anxiety of marketers right now where you have to learn new skills. The channels we've relied on are changing the buyer journ. And I don't think the pace of change is ever going to slow down. I think that this is the new normal. What advice do you have for marketers to try to stay ahead of that pace of change?
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Chris O'Neill
Yeah, I alluded to a little bit of this, but I said you got to dive in. I mean, try it for yourself. Like, just don't live in a world of anxiety and rumination. You know, get into the tools, hang up for Claude, cowork. Most companies make it available, but if not, it's worth the investment. So take a course. There's plenty of them on YouTube and you know, spend a couple hours and just show, you'll show, teach yourself and see how powerful this stuff is. So I think that's, you know, I, I spent three hours over one holiday on Monday recently and it was just like, oh my goodness, the rest of the week I was sort of like, oh my gosh, I don't have enough time in the rest of the week to, to really, you know, tuck in a couple extra sessions. But that's one. No, I, I think like figuring out a modern stack, right. I think that part of what we're seeing and in, in behind all the anxiety about the SaaS apocalypse or whatever the heck we're calling it today is really like, you know, the tools of the past are probably getting a little long in the tooth. So, you know, just being a system of record is necessary, but not sufficient to adding real value is as a tool. That said, experiment with modern technologies, modern technology, stacks doesn't have to be all or nothing. You can start small and finish fast. But again, I just like you said, not going to change. So you can sit and stick your head in the ground or you can embrace it and say, look, what matters is speed and agility and velocity, a direction that really you move through as quickly as possible. So that is not only the present, but certainly the future. So, you know, figure out how to move quickly, learn how to embrace mistakes, and really focus on learning agility as much as anything else. Like, that's, that's the best advice I can offer above and beyond what we've already talked about.
- [27:16]
Benjamin Shapiro
Here's my takeaway from our conversation. Everything marketers are anxious about, they should be anxious about. But on the flip side, there is an equivalent amount of opportunity for them to learn new skills and create value. And out of that, value, future wealth. And so where we're sitting here saying everything is going away, it's not that everything is going away. Things are changing. And that creates an opportunity for marketers to reinvent what they're doing, figure out a new way. Look, it's 52 card pickup right now, and you've got an opportunity to pick up as many cards as you want and hopefully you end up with more than you had before. Chris, I want to move on to our lightning round where I'm going to ask you a couple of questions about how to, how to pivot, some of your career experiences. You've been around and seen some things. Are you ready?
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Chris O'Neill
Let's go.
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Benjamin Shapiro
All right, first one. What's the fastest pivot you've ever made and what forced you to do it?
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Chris O'Neill
You mean outside of basketball in 10th grade?
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Benjamin Shapiro
I don't know. Were you a good basketball player? Let's talk about it.
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Chris O'Neill
I was more of a hockey guy.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Air o'. Neill.
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Chris O'Neill
Yeah. No, I think in the early days, I was really fortunate to be a part of a company called Glean. In the early days, we were sort of trying to find product market fit. And in the early days, we basically were using proofs of concept. And then one customer one day said, can I just try it like tomorrow? We're like, yes, you can. And in fact, that became a dominant motion in the early days where people just wanted to experiment with these tools. So that would be probably one of the fastest. We circumvented a six week proof of concept to go right into, right into production within 24 hours. That was pretty cool.
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Benjamin Shapiro
You were at Evernote. I think you worked on the Google Cloud team. I know. I was kind of waiting for it to be like, well, when Apple dropped Notes into the platform, we really had to change things at Evernote or something like that. I'm glad you went back in the early days.
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Chris O'Neill
Wow. Apple sure did draw inspiration from a lot of what we did at Evernote. And that's part of how business works.
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Benjamin Shapiro
I suppose that's what they do. All right, next one. What's the one martech category you think AI will erase first?
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Chris O'Neill
I think these standalone A B tool testing tools are probably going to go away. I think what, what I'm describing is a world where there's persistent always on measurement. So it's not like some discrete thing you do like, oh, we're in testing mode now and now we're in rollout. It's going to be constant always on measurement. So I think getting standalone tools would be toast.
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Benjamin Shapiro
It's funny, I didn't actually think about measurement as being part of the problems. I was assuming it was going to be something like, well, your SEO tools are going. So some of the SEO monitoring, that's true. Some of those channels that we've already seen, I'm thinking more of a channel basis as opposed to evaluation. But measurement's a good one as well. Okay, what's the most useful AI workflow you've personally used this week?
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Chris O'Neill
Use Claude Cowork to write my investor update. We have a monthly update to our investors. My wife and I are getting ready for a meeting with our financial planner next week and I saw a whole bunch of really cool prompts on Twitter. So literally it was like, I don't know if it was Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley. Welcome management team. Like, produce like a 15 page document that is cool. Like, holy cow. Like, you can get the same level of expertise by using cloud for things like your, I don't know, your financial picture or taxes or whatever the heck you choose. So those are two fun ones this week.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Yeah, I've got a good one. I took all of the newsletters. I get most of them I don't have time to get through.
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Chris O'Neill
Oh yeah.
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Benjamin Shapiro
And I use Claude code to make an application that takes my newsletter letters, transcribes them, strips out all of the ads, puts a headline describing who they are, puts a music bed in each one, and then sends them to an RSS feed so I can actually listen to them to the podcast. And as I was building this, I'm like, wait, I just turned every newsletter into a podcast, but I run a podcast business. Did I just kill my business? I'm a little nervous.
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Chris O'Neill
That's a cool use case, though.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Well, hopefully it doesn't end. I hear everything in the MarTech podcast. Okay, let's move on to the next one. What's the biggest lie marketing teams tell themselves about being data driven?
- [31:32]
Chris O'Neill
I think sometimes people confuse having a dashboard for being data driven. It's Easy to measure things like that. And most of those dashboards are just so correlative in nature. So I shared earlier, I think if something's not causal in nature, where you can show that this caused something else, I think you're wasting your time.
- [31:50]
Benjamin Shapiro
Yeah, I think a lot of it is also that when you're looking at your historical data, it doesn't necessarily factor into what the real world conditions are right now. It is not always predictive about what's going to happen. And mostly in marketing, the world is a dramatically different place right now than it was last year.
- [32:06]
Chris O'Neill
Good point.
- [32:07]
Benjamin Shapiro
You're using year over year benchmarks. I mean, that's a good point. What tools were you using last year? What channels were you using? Well, another brand new one.
- [32:14]
Chris O'Neill
Another. Another fun one as I had a colleague, Avinas, Kashika's David, he was really big into actionable metrics, right. So like when he came into a company, he would always turn the dashboard off and see who would complain and usually very few people would. And the, the bar that he said, I like it is to say if, if, you know, if you're not, if a dashboard doesn't have something, you could do something differently about it, then you're probably wasting your time. So the concept of, you know, not only causal but like that you can act, take action on like. So I'm a big fan of like, you know, really thinking about like you're going to look at something, you darn well be able to do something, not just like looking at the weather. So that's another thought on that.
- [32:51]
Benjamin Shapiro
All right, let's talk. Let's call this one buzzword buzz kill. What's one phrase from AI vendor pitches that you wish would just fall off the face of the earth?
- [33:03]
Chris O'Neill
How long, how long is this by? I would, I think it's really becoming redundant to say AI powered at this point. You know, AI is quickly becoming like electricity or, you know, for many years, you know, I remember this, this venture capitalist kept, kept describing themselves as a mobile. They invest in mobile. And I was like, it is. What does that even mean anymore? And I think we're close, closing in if we're not already there in terms of like AI powered. Like, what does that even mean? Everything's going to be AI powered if it isn't already.
- [33:33]
Benjamin Shapiro
Yeah, I actually that's a great one. I feel like I need to go back through my website and start to adjust some copy because we were an AI powered production company and till everything
- [33:43]
Chris O'Neill
became high power, that's how it works.
- [33:45]
Benjamin Shapiro
All right, the last one I have for you. My wife is going to kill me. You're on the board of Gap Inc. Tell me one good thing about Old Navy's strategy.
- [33:54]
Chris O'Neill
Old Navy's doing great, by the way. So thanks to your wife for all the great work she's doing, IO and the team, you know, it sets up a wonderful brand, right? It's about democratization and bringing joy into fashion. You know, Old Navy delivers such good quality clothing for very little cost. And it's about joy. I think that's, that's fantastic. And the other thing, little less sexy like all the behind the scenes things and supply chain and really, you know, turn turning ideas from literally like designers minds into an affordable, high quality fashion is, is astoundingly great. They are running, you know, a multi, multibillion dollar operation flawlessly right now. And I couldn't be happier to see the team. And again, the latest thing they're doing is something called rfid. They're putting RFID in the tags and the clothing, which allows all sorts of benefits in store, basically allows you to track inventory in interesting ways and deliver a better elevated customer experience. That's a huge bet they're making. So I love to see them both stay true to the value of bringing joy and affordable value to fashion, but also pushing in to interesting technologies that allow their operations just to continue to be as efficient, as effective as possible. So I mean, I could go on for a long time about a lot of the things Ohio and the whole team at Old Navy are doing, but it's a delight to watch and privilege to be a part of a small part of the journey.
- [35:23]
Benjamin Shapiro
What a wonderful answer to a question that undoubtedly is going to get an eye roll here at home. Chris, I appreciate you humoring me, coming on the podcast and sharing your wisdom about the pace of change and everything that's happening for marketers in the age of AI.
- [35:38]
Chris O'Neill
My pleasure. Thank you, Penchan.
- [35:40]
Sponsor Voice
And a special thanks to Scrunch for sponsoring this interview. Scrunch is the AI customer experience platform that helps marketing teams understand how AI agents experience their site. They tell you how your brand shows up in LLM results, where it doesn't, and what's preventing your content from being retrieved, trusted or recommended. And for Martech podcast listeners, Scrunch is providing a free website diagnostic that uncovers how AI sees your site, where you have content gaps and how you're showing up versus your competition. To see how LLMs evaluate your site, go to scrunch.com that's scrunch S C-R-U-N
- [36:17]
Benjamin Shapiro
C-H.com all right, that wraps up this episode of the Martech Podcast. Thanks for listening to my conversation with Chris o', Neill, the CEO of Growth Loop. If you'd like to contact Chris, 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 growthloop.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 on YouTube and we'll be back in your feed next week. All right, that's it for today, but until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy.
- [37:18]
Podcast Announcer
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