Welcome to Artificially Intelligent Marketing,
a weekly podcast where we stay on top of the
latest trends, tips, and tools in the world of
marketing AI, helping you get the best results
from your marketing efforts. Now let's join our
hosts, Paul Avery and Martin Broadhurst. Hello
everyone, welcome back again to Artificially
Intelligent Marketing. Paul Avery here, and I'm
also joined by my good pal, Martin Broadhurst.
Martin, how are we? oh i am alive and kicking
this morning it's been half term last week so
i was not in the office but i was exploring the
science museum in london and the natural history
museum and doing all that good touristy stuff
with a the four -year -old in tow any robots
There were robots at the Science Museum for sure.
There was a large animatronic T -Rex at the Natural
History Museum, although I'm not entirely sure
that constitutes artificial intelligence. Goodness,
I hope they don't put GPT -5 in that. And then
it's like, oh, but it might be able to see, but...
I learnt from Jurassic Park very reliably that
it can only see you if you move. So you just,
I'd love to see that. You just still stood in
the museum now, Martin, like, we can't move.
Just very still. I mean, that is an absolute
nonsense myth perpetuated by Jurassic Park. Huge
eyeballs and vision that was kind of, the eyes
were at the front, right? So it's got proper
depth perception. It was a very good vision.
Are you suggesting that Hollywood movies can't
be trusted for their factual accuracy? Because
that would basically ruin my life if you suggest
that's true. Look, I'm just saying that Jurassic
Park, as great a movie as it is, and boy, do
I love it, wasn't representative of the actual
abilities of dinosaurs as we understand them.
Sorry, listeners, we should cut this out. We're
not going to. We're going to make you listen
to this unnecessary stories about dinosaurs.
But there's some stories that are very necessary
about AI this week. And we're going to get stuck
into everything that marketers need to know.
Martin, kick us off with you've been trawling
through earnings calls, haven't you? And found
some interesting stuff. What have you been looking
at? The past week, we've had earning calls from
both Google and Meta. both of which highlight
the importance of the ai investments within the
actual advertising suites of both companies just
starting with meta they have announced huge engagement
improvements through using new ai tools and ai
product offerings so they're saying that the
ai recommendations led to five percent more time
on facebook and ten percent on threads video
time on instagram is up more than 30 percent
last year and that's been driven by ai and facebook
systems now surface twice as many reels published
per day they've also launched this new tool called
vibes where you can within the meta ai app you
can basically create images and have them animated
as well i think that's in partnership with mid
journey where they're using some of the mid journey
technology for a kind of aesthetics application
within the image generation In terms of numbers
of images created, it's quite massive. People
have created over 20 billion images using Meta's
products. So that's quite dramatic. But the big
story really, as I mentioned, is the AI in advertising.
So they're saying that the financial impact of
AI is huge. There is an annual run rate of...
end -to -end ai powered ad tools which has passed
60 billion dollars so that's to say there is
60 billion dollars worth of advertising on an
annualized basis that is being affected impacted
deployed call it what you may using the ai suite
of tools within facebook it's super interesting
because um obviously i think as marketers we
spend a lot of our time thinking about generative
ai and the stuff we can make but a big thing
that many marketers are interested in but is
taking a while to really solidify is targeting
right we we want to send the right message to
the right person at the right time and ai has
a lot of applications to offer us there so it
sounds like meta is really ramping up its ability
to know what content it needs to show to what
person to keep them on site which is an advertiser
you're probably quite happy with because it probably
means they're also surfacing the right ads to
the right people more accurately and effectively
than they did so in the past yeah very much so
and it goes beyond uh the creative into all of
those areas that you've touched so they've got
this suite of tools called advantage plus which
has audience targeting it has creatives it has
placements which decides where the ads should
appear so should they appear in feed in reels
on instagram on facebook on threads etc but they've
also got a destination targeting as well and
budget optimization now you can deploy an ad
campaign using the whole suite or you can just
choose advantage plus audiences or creative for
creative optimization now all of this kind of
feeds into mark zuckerberg's vision for the advertising
suite he actually says on the earnings call advertisers
are increasingly just going to be able to give
us a business objective and give us a credit
card or bank account and have the ai system basically
figure out everything that's necessary including
generating video or different types of creative
that might resonate with different people that
are personalized in different ways, finding who
the right customers are. So this is going to
be interesting. I don't think it's so true now,
but in the, I'm not going to say early days,
but earlier, less sophisticated AI days, there
was reticence from folks working in things like,
you know, Google search ads to leverage AI, because
I think there was this. feeling that ai from
google's perspective their goal was to get you
to spend more money and that if you turn over
control of your campaigns to google you may or
you may not get better results but one thing
they felt you could guarantee is you would end
up spending more money it'll be interesting to
see if marketers continue to feel like that as
these suites of tools emerge because you know
do you really want to hand over complete control
of your campaigns to your supplier basically
he's like yeah i'll optimize your campaigns you
will on average spend about five times more than
you used to are you cool with that because i'll
definitely get you better results and i guess
there are some business models where you want
to scale up and up and up but there are others
where things like product inventory will become
the limiting factor and all of this type of stuff
so yeah i i can see the advantage for everyone
i just i'm not sure i don't trust meta to take
most of the spoils of making this better do you
know what i mean Oh, absolutely. They're going
to skim off as much as they can. And I think
the experience of any advertisers using things
like Performance Max in Google will tell you
that there's a somewhat obfuscation of data that
you can access. And when you dig into the kinds
of things it's been bidding on and you see how
much it's bid on some of the keywords, there
is quite a lot of money being burnt on ad targeting
and ad placements that... no human would have
ever decided to have actually deployed. There
is another interesting development on the meta
AI piece, which is where they're getting their
targeting options from. So starting from December,
they are announcing that the company will use
conversation data from the meta AI chat app to
target ads. So that means any chats. that are
conducted with meta ai on messenger on whatsapp
or anything like that could soon inform the answer
you see now this will obviously open up more
insights into what people are looking for what
kind of more stronger intent data shall we say
but also privacy concerns I mean, talk about
waving a red flag. Yeah, I think, you know, I
think Meta's got like 1 billion monthly users
of their AI, so they claim. I'd love to know
what counts as a use of Meta AI, because certainly
I don't chat with it on any platform, but I don't
know if I search for something on Instagram or
whatever, maybe that counts as an interaction.
But ultimately, everybody's doing this, right?
ChatGPT is... going to have a how do they create
the memory function if they don't also give themselves
the ability to share very personalized ads based
on the same memory that you as a user are benefiting
from obviously google's entire business model
is understanding the searcher to show them better
ads and you know more relevant ads over time
it's almost like i feel like meta's the one that
you know there's no smoking daggers we all know
what their end game is um but anybody who with
a product that's driven by ai is trying to basically
optimize for our attention regardless and better
understand us in order to to do that so yeah
the cynic in me is like oh it makes me not want
to use any meta products and then like i take
a step back from that and i know i probably shouldn't
use any digital products if i feel like that
and then you know That's probably most of the
things I use during my day. I've now got to start
questioning whether or not I would use them or
not. So maybe privacy is a myth. But I can see
that people will definitely potentially be a
bit freaked out by some of this. They will. But
hats off to Meta for, you know, they're quite
upfront about it. And I guess this is another
way in which the incentive is there for them
to develop a stronger foundational model. Because
when people start using... meta ai when they
have an experience using meta ai which is free
and it's delivering results that are as good
or comparable with the best chatbots elsewhere
then low friction low cost is a path that we
know consumers often take so if they can monetize
that as you say there's no uh there's no hiding
what meta's business model has always been about
is advertising revenue at the end of the day
so yeah there's a there's strong incentives for
them to to create a super intelligent model to
get you to chat to it a bit more yeah so obviously
meta pretty busy but google had a pretty good
quarter as well and uh supposedly driven quite
a lot by ai what was going on over at google
and their earnings call pretty good water indeed
They posted their first ever billion dollar quarter.
And the drive... 100 billion, 100 billion dollar
quarter. Sorry, yeah. I mean, should we edit
that out? No, we're not going to edit this out.
Sorry, listeners, we're leaving it in. Because
I have now just got Dr. Evil in my mind and mine's
going... They made $1 billion. And then everyone
with Dr. Eve was like, no, they're a trillion
dollar company. $100 billion. $100 billion quarter,
Martin. And what's driving this? Is it AI? Completely
thrown me off there. Yes, it's AI, unsurprisingly,
in its core ad products for both Search and YouTube.
uh both seeing 15 year -on -year growth new features
like ai overviews are encouraging users to make
more complex queries and to stay on the platform
a bit longer while automated campaign tools like
the aforementioned performance max are delivering
performance lifts as well so yeah all in all
pretty good sounds like um the ai tools for youtube
and video advertising is quite interesting so
they're using ai to analyze video content to
identify better better fit and ads and better
fit creatives for certain videos based on the
content of the video which i think is quite an
interesting use case um but yeah they're saying
um ai is the future of advertising but interestingly
when you dig into the the numbers the ad network
so the external network can you remember what
that's called i can't the display network basically
revenue from that is down and some people are
saying well that's because ai mode and ai search
is sending less traffic to publishers so if publishers
are getting less traffic then google's display
ads are getting shown less so it's kind of cannibalizing
that bit of its market I'm sure there are markets
where Google Display works really well, but it
always used to make me smile. In the life sciences,
it's so easy to set it up wrong and burn a load
of cash sharing ads in places you don't want
them. The classic is the amount of ads that get
shown on kids' games on your mobile phone. You
know, the free games where you play for 10 minutes
and then you have to look at an ad for 15 seconds.
So, yeah, I've got my own problems with Google
Display anyway. Maybe people are just moving
away from using it because it's not always that
good. But it is interesting because we were just
talking about, you know, who gets the spoils
if ads work better. But there were a couple of
case studies. Again, they can cherry pick these.
I don't know how robust these are. But, you know,
Kayak seeing that 10, 12 % increase in conversion
value. SoFi achieving that 39 % improvement in
conversion volume. That at least is a share of
the spoils in terms of AI improving performance,
which is pretty interesting. The other thing
I saw that was pretty interesting, Martin, because
we talked about this a lot off air, is reels
and shorts. So YouTube shorts are now earning
more revenue per watch hour than traditional
in -stream ads, which is ever more evidence that
people are migrating to short, bite -sized content.
we've seen success little insider secret for
the for the podcast people um with our own reels
running them on youtube shorts being able to
get much greater penetrance than we could with
you know the full length episode google obviously
working overtime to try and you know show these
short form content to people get them engaged
in it etc so it's going to be interesting to
see that continue And maybe that is a great place
then to be putting your ads as well. And I'm
sure PMAX is doing that automatically. So it
creates quite a complex ecosystem, right? They've
got their own chips. They've got their own AI
models. They've got the reach that comes with
Google search and YouTube and all of these platforms.
It's hard to, I mean, for me, Google would really
have to mess this whole AI thing up not to be
the winner in the end, surely. Yeah, and their
capital investments are increasing dramatically
as well. So in this earnings report, they talked
about $95 billion of capital expenditure forward
looking. So I think that might have been this
year and they're looking to continue that as
well. So huge investments across the board, but
they're not alone in that. I think you can see
the same thing from, well, obviously from OpenAI,
but also from all the other big labs as well.
Rightio. Let's move on to our next story then,
Martin. What have you got for us next? Okay,
so some big acquisition news from my favorite
CRM provider. I should say, full disclosure,
I am a HubSpot Platinum partner, so I'm bound
to plug them wherever I can. But yes, HubSpot
have announced the acquisition of XFunnel, which
is a platform dedicated to what it calls... answer
engine optimization aeo you might see it geo
generative engine optimization call it what you
will but it's basically how visible are you in
search queries within ai chat assistance so this
acquisition is pretty much a direct acknowledgement
that more and more people are turning to ai first
rather than search engines and brands need to
make sure that they're part of that conversation
hubspot says ai drone leads already convert three
times better than traditional search and this
is a bet on that accelerating as a trend back
to aeo yeah i it's one of those i still think
i understand why everybody's betting that people
start interacting with chatbots more than google
search and and people remember that a lot of
people i think feel they miss the boat on seo
like if i was the first to market for seo can
you imagine all the traffic i would have got
and how much money i would have made and oh does
everybody remember when google ads was really
cheap not me because i didn't use it early enough
and by the time i figured out to use it it was
too expensive for everyone so i think there's
this weird fomo that's driving all of this which
is not to say So interacting with chatbots, having
your brand present in chatbots is strategically
valuable. It is probably where everybody's going
to go. Don't know what that time period is going
to be. But using a chatbot to get information
is quite often not the same as Google searching
for stuff. I do think there'll be a time where
we're like, chat GPT, I need to buy X, Y, Z.
Can you go do the research and give me a breakdown
of which one I should buy? But I just don't know
how quick that's going to come around. And so
this massive push into AEO, I know it's important.
I do think people should be thinking about it,
especially if you've got quite a sophisticated
marketing stack already and you do SEO and you
do PPC, like you can probably start to get ahead
early here if you're doing the right things.
But look, obviously HubSpot think it's important
because otherwise it wouldn't have made this
acquisition. Yeah, and I'm very much inclined
to agree with you. We've discussed previously,
people are saying, how do you optimize for search
in AI? And I think this is such a nascent technology
and channel for people that the tactics at work
today will probably change in six months. I think
I saw an interesting study that looked at how
prominent Reddit was in the search results of
OpenAI. And now within six months of that first
piece of research coming out, Reddit has dramatically
fallen off in terms of the visibility within
search results. So clearly there's some... tweaking
and ongoing optimization of search results and
sources in the back end but generally speaking
if you are trying to optimize for ai i don't
think you can do yourself any harm by focusing
on just having good brand building campaigns
the classics of good pr will stand you in good
stead when it comes to getting found in both
search whether that's traditional search or AI
search. Yeah, I think that's, you've hit the
nail on the head. I think about interacting with
the chatbot on if I'm going to buy something
or if I'm gathering information on something
as having an intern and that that intern is going
to try and gather information from lots of sources
and then weigh up what is important and what
isn't. And ultimately having... You know, that
high brand awareness, that brand equity, that
people speak about your brand favourably online
in lots of different places. So it's very likely
that if you've been good at marketing and you
continue to be good at marketing, you're probably
going to do quite well when it comes to the alien
intern AI going off and doing some research and
coming back and saying, I've looked into it.
this product here has five star reviews is you
know is mentioned in lots of case studies etc
etc so yeah i think i suspect where most people
will go hunting is for where the arbitra the
early arbitrages are like you said if if reddit
was being disproportionately used to drive results
and you go all out on Reddit and try and make
sure your brand dominates in Reddit, then probably
for a month or two, maybe you are doing much
better. And I suspect that is the bit that everybody's
hunting to try and capture. But like you said,
if it moves that quickly, you may invest a load
of time and energy optimising for something that's
a short -term hack. that doesn't actually then
deliver long -term value do you get the value
for money of trying to you know push too hard
or should you white hat style invest in all the
good marketing practices that you either get
good results over the long term and will probably
get you good results when it comes to being mentioned
in ai answers yeah i think if you've been in
the seo game for the last well forever uh you've
seen this story before That being said, it's
quite nice when you have one single platform.
Obviously, we're HubSpot users as well. Our website
is built on HubSpot. And it's nice when you have
one tool to rule them all. It certainly does
make your lives a bit easier. So I'm all for
HubSpot adding more and more capabilities that
just make it easier for us to do holistic marketing
and track performance and results. Yeah, I think
having this baked in, because the product that
they've got in terms of its capabilities x funnel
will search across all of the major search platforms
so it will look on claude it will look on chat
gpt it will look on grok etc etc so it's got
some really nice dashboards and reports i assume
they're going to bring in these core elements
into the to the product but i expect as much
as anything given that the product itself isn't
that old i dare say this is as much a talent
acquisition as anything else um but yeah i think
HubSpot with their shift towards what they're
calling loop marketing, which is a kind of progression
away from inbound marketing of attract, convert,
close, delight, or whatever that ended up becoming
attract, engage, delight. I think it was with
the flywheel. They're now talking about loop
marketing and this very much feeds in into that.
Now, whether you think loop marketing as a methodology
is good or not. We can have that conversation
over on LinkedIn, but maybe one for another day,
Paul. No, we're having it here. There's two things.
You've triggered me now. The first thing is,
and I don't want this to be confirmation bias,
but I saw a really interesting post on LinkedIn
this week of someone highlighting the amount
of traffic for a bunch of websites they managed
that was coming from ChatGPT and other AI sources
have basically bottomed out. So obviously it
started at naught. went up to like two, three,
5 % as a source and then didn't move over the
last few months. And that chat GPT was by far
the biggest referrer of traffic compared to clawed
perplexity and stuff. Take of that what you will.
Obviously my confirmation bias was like, yeah,
see, see, it may not be a massive source yet
because they answer, they provide you with answers
in the chat. They don't give you links to go
click, which of course doesn't mean that people
don't go Google stuff and then you can't. track
that through and you know i take it that that's
a bit of a a dark art to try and figure out that
that traffic and the second thing is hubspot
you gotta love them they did so well coining
a methodology inbound marketing basically you
know create a new way of marketing that's so
tightly associated with their commercial brand
genius right of course it was genius however
they're now like Do you know how we were really
successful? We came up with this cool methodology.
We got everyone to do it and then we basically
completely tied it to our brand. Now we need
a new methodology so that we can tie it to our
brand. Enter Loop Marketing. Oh, what's old is
new and give it a name and all this other stuff.
So I'm a bit cynical on that stuff. I know you
are as well, Martin. You must tell us your real
feelings about Loop. Can you do it? I just do
not buy it at all. First of all, I think my biggest
issue is with it. The previous iterations of
attract, engage, delight, and attract, convert,
close, delight, what have you, were all related
and aligned to different areas of the customer
journey. You were moving someone through stages
of they buy, whether it was the awareness stage,
the consideration stage, the decision making
stage, you were aligning that. The loop marketing
piece moves away from that. So we don't get into
the whole customer. It's not customer focused.
It's how you, it's an internal methodology. It's
how you execute marketing internally. So you
find your brand voice, you create and amplify,
and then you iterate and evolve. I haven't even
got the whole thing right there. such as my disinterest
in it but it's about how you internally execute
and it's so far away so far removed from the
customer which used to be the central point of
the whole method that i find it a little bit
i find it a bit jarring if i'm honest it feels
like such a shift in terms of hubspot's tone
that's super interesting when you put it that
way because i think one of the things that made
hubspot so successful was identifying how important
it was to put the customer at the center of everything
that you do and how to push brands more towards
doing that so then to pivot into a model which
doesn't do that i mean how long before they put
the ai at the center of everything that'll be
the next model it's probably four or five years
away and it's when you have to optimize for ai
agents instead of humans it's coming it's absolutely
it's just around the corner i can i think i can
Smell it in the air. Do you know what, I was
doing some work this week just thinking about
scenario planning for, you know, if you're a
marketer over the next five years that you run
a marketing team, you're a marketing director,
let's say, what should you do if AI never gets
any better? Right through to what should you
do if... Companies become swarms of AI agents
where there's like five human employees and a
thousand AI agent employees. And this is mostly
driven by the book that we've been having a bit
of a reading club, haven't we, Mark? We've been
reading The Last Economy by Imad Mustaq, which
is super interesting and it kind of drove my
thinking here. He paints a picture where it's
not unreasonable to expect AI agents. running
most of commercial organizations um so i've just
been i've been thinking about a lot of this stuff
and it's there's such a wide variety of possibilities
actually on the technology front because it's
moving so quickly that the biggest bottleneck
is probably going to be human change and adoption
we talked about this a little bit on the last
podcast when we were talking about training but
i was just wondering What sort of futures are
you preparing for? Like in your mind, what does
marketing as a function look like over the next
couple of years? This is a question that people
ask in the workshops that I deliver quite a lot.
And I really struggle to have an answer because
it's so difficult to know. The scenarios vary
so wildly. ai agents become a thing in the way
that they are described autonomous goal -oriented
on 24 7 able to take action if that world transpires
in say three to five years that's a dramatically
different world from one in which they don't
really happen and actually when we refer to ai
agents what we're really talking about is ai
agentic workflows that are 80 built by humans
with a few steps where agents get involved along
the way and so they're wildly different and i
think it also depends entirely on how that agentic
capability manifests at the consumer level as
well we've seen google at the developer conference
recently sharing ai mode with the ability to
make purchases so you can do your search you
can research a handbag it will bring up a list
of handbags and then you can you can say buy
that and they're they're creating these ai commerce
platforms that you can integrate with and paypal
is integrating with with chat gpt as well so
in terms of what we can say is happening i think
marketers are going to need to make sure that
whatever they're routes to market are they have
got those optimized for ai commerce in the next
12 months that needs needs to happen you need
to enable your route to market to be able to
sell through an ai agent at a basic level as
just described beyond that where people are autonomously
sending out agents to run 24 hours a day seven
days a week that feels so far away When you try
and use an agent over a long time horizon, you
just get so many errors and frustrations. It
just feels like another world. If that actually
can happen, then I'm not the person to answer
that question because at that point we are reshaping
the future. I think that's a really good answer.
Seeing as I put you on the spot, that's a cracking
answer. Shall I take you through the scenarios
that I mapped out? I would love to hear them.
Alrighty. So I think the first thing with this
is I was doing a brainstorm here with AI, which
I guess feels a bit meta and potentially somewhat
biased. But it was it was usually ideas I had
that I wanted AI to critique. And it did a really
good job. And if you if you don't do that, dear
listener, very often, it is amazing. If you analyze
a particular situation or you come up with some
ideas, trying. encourage the sycophantic AI not
to be a sycophant and to actually critically
assess your ideas and find the holes. Because
then you can plug them or change your idea or
what have you. So while I was going through this
process, I was mindful that the timelines I was
working on were three to five years. But I do
think this, we will reach one of the later scenarios,
but it just might take 10 years instead of three,
five. And so I think as you listen to this, I
want you to keep that in mind. And then I want
you to be the human critique agent. and you can
see if you can pull these apart so scenario number
one is basically business as usual it's where
we're at now for whatever reason hallucinations
are still rife agents can't be trusted to do
anything because they just make too many compounding
errors and we're left adopting the tech that
we have now and it does help improve speed and
efficiency in areas by allowing us to create
first drafts of content, start to do some smart
analysis of different channels and how well they're
performing so that humans can optimize strategies
and place different bets and etc. But you're
getting not much more than the efficiency gains
that you're getting now. And you're doing this
also in a sea of fears around AIs going rogue
and making mistakes. I mean, we've already seen
those examples, right? chatbots providing information
that they shouldn't and and um and companies
being held accountable for what ai chatbots say
right just those types of compliance fears um
which probably means how you're marketing now
is how you market for quite a while i don't think
that's going to be the scenario but that's kind
of scenario one scenario two is ai is more broadly
used And it starts to augment campaigns and it's
more trustworthy for delivering on certain aspects
of work. So there might be small niche agents
that can do stuff that you can rely on without
having to micromanage them. And this is interesting
because even though the humans are still the
strategists, maybe this conductor role that we've
talked about in the past, the ability to do much
more at scale becomes significantly increased
when. the first draft of content needs barely
any edits or you can set an ai agent to go in
you know maybe p max max max max is able to do
a little bit what you said about meta earlier
like give us a goal give us a credit card and
we'll optimize for that um then i think you start
to see a real speed increase um i want to believe
that marketing teams stay the same size and do
five times as much work and drive that type of
commercial growth but of course That might not
be the case. I do think that will be, though.
I think under these conditions, as an individual,
this is where you're like, I need to make sure
that I am learning how to leverage these systems
to scale myself. But there's still error. There's
no set and forget. It's human in the loop in
a lot of different areas. And it's just those
niche things. And I can imagine this is where
having a HubSpot that has 15 different ai products
that allow you to build great email campaigns
or um automate your social media publishing but
with a human review step before anything goes
live and stuff like that what i think will be
quite critical um because i think you'll be living
in the marketing tools you've already got and
getting better and faster because of bits that
they do for you that you would have done yourself
um you could argue that we're here already but
i don't think we are like you can't You can't
tell HubSpot I want to run an email marketing
campaign and it builds five emails and you just
like run your eyes over them. We just we're not
there yet. In scenario three, it's kind of the
same thing, but the scale up is being driven
by personalization. So you told us a bit earlier
about what Meta's being able to do with capturing
more and more data about folks. And it's the
ability for AI to segment audiences. in fine
detail based on behavioral signals but we then
have to use ai to create content at the scale
to meet those people where they're at because
it's almost like ai gives us ability to market
to smaller groups but we don't want a hundred
people trying to do that that wouldn't be very
efficient or effective so ai does a lot of the
work and again to be able to market to go from
five segments to 500 you're going to be trusting
the ai to run sam campaigns without human oversight
right we're starting to get to the point where
i feel like that's plausible in the next couple
of years i think the biggest thing to watch out
for is how well ai driven advertising really
can leverage those signals so this meta how this
develops with meta is going to be really interesting
um and also the pushback from humans right personally
i would rather have ads that are much more personalised
to me, then I know I'm going to see that because
that's how these platforms make their money.
So I'd rather they were personalised. But not
everybody feels like that. And you will have
those scenarios. Do you, I don't know if this
is an apocryphal tale at this point in time.
Do you know that story about the supermarket
club card style point system where somebody,
yeah, I see you nodding. Tell me, do you know
this story? yeah so it was it was from America
wasn't it was like Target or one of those was
supposed to have sent somebody the um the the
pregnancy related catalog was it through the
post and it was supposed to be that their buying
purchases indicated that they were pregnant before
they even knew they were pregnant right right
and I think also they lived in a household with
their wider family and therefore the other members
of their family knew they were pregnant as well
because this thing lands on the on the table
and triggers that conversation that they didn't
really want so there's obviously going to be
a number of times where this doesn't work well
and they're going to be really big news and i
do think that that will somewhat hold some of
this stuff back scenario four this is where we
start to like overreach a little bit um And it
becomes hard to imagine. But like I said at the
beginning, I don't think that means it doesn't
happen. I just think it maybe takes longer, which
is AI can automate marketing workflows at scale
on a near one to one level. And we go from like
an AI conductor. that's managing like a copywriting
agent and an ad management agent to like an AI
business director that has a marketing agent
that manages all those other agents. And marketing
is borderline a function that's being driven
by AI. AI is capturing data on customers, create
a hypothesis about products that should be developed
and influence the whole business stack, which
becomes much harder. to imagine i think and then
the last scenario is the one that's the hardest
to imagine as you alluded to a moment ago mine
which is kind of along the email stack lines
for the uh you know for the next economy where
agents are the entire business and there there
may not even be a director of the agents the
director is an agent themselves and as humans
we might just be lucky to be the shareholders
or whatever that are maybe giving the business
overall goals about the markets we want to be
in and what have you. But the agents are doing
all the work. This, if you, I went down a rabbit
hole with this one, mine, and you can start to
imagine these weird agentic AI swarms that recruit
other agents. It's almost like a gig economy
for agents. Where the business itself is not
like, oh, well, there were 100 agents and now
there are 1 ,000 agents. It's like, no, there's
probably just like one agent. And it recruits
all these other agents when it needs them for
certain aspects, whether that might be, you know,
product strategy, manufacturing, because maybe
this is being driven by robotics. And then you
have an entire economy almost entirely driven
by AI and robots. At which point as a marketer,
you're probably not required let's be honest
you probably weren't required in scenario four
but by scenario five um you're hopefully not
only you're not it's not a four -day week or
three -day week it might be a 0 .5 day week and
hopefully we have got this wonderful abundant
future where we can play golf or knit or go to
the beach or play call of duty whatever it is
you want to do with your life and you don't actually
necessarily have to worry so much about working
for money to live but um I've dumped a lot of
information on you there, Martin. Thoughts? Well,
Scenario 5 is borderline singularity territory,
isn't it? If marketing as a function is affected
to that degree, so is pretty much every other
business function at that point. And I think
that is where some of the AI labs envisage this
going. And instead of you having a payroll to
your employees, you just... have all of your
AI agents powered by board or whatever it may
be. I really like the idea of them just kind
of dipping in and out of other agents, so coordinating
agents, not just your own internal agents, but
pulling on external ones. And it's interesting
if you think about what that would mean as a
pivot for, say, software providers. Let's say
you're, I don't know, MailChimp, and you have
an... email marketing agent that company's internal
marketing director agent can just kind of tap
into and go, right, we've got this database,
go create a campaign for us. Here's our creative
from our Canva or Adobe agent. Execute that at
scale across this segment. Yeah, I'd consider
it. considered operating like that but i guess
in some respects it's like mcp and api credit
should be dipping in and out of the services
as and when you need them i think the scenario
that you describe so scenario four just just
remind me what that one scenario four is the
one where um we are effectively mostly driven
by agents there's like a business director who's
a human who's like okay we want to enter this
market But the marketing director is an agent
that directs a bunch of other agents. I think
in some ways you can think of these scenarios
as less human coordination of niche agents and
the agents becoming the coordinators until they
are the entire economy, basically. So in scenario
four, there is still a CEO. There may even be
some sort of human leadership team. But a lot
of the planning strategy and execution is being
done by the agents based on the goals set by
the humans. I think that's certainly feasible
looking a few years out, particularly when businesses
start to reimagine their entire workflows and
start thinking AI agent workflow first. If you
look at the positioning with, say, Zapier at
the moment, they're really talking about AI orchestration
is the big thing they're talking about. How do
you get AIs to orchestrate? other ai's using
either predetermined workflows that maybe have
an ai step in them or agentic workflows where
a big chunk of the work is done by ai but then
the following steps or the trigger might be initiated
by a human um it requires rethinking the structure
of the organization doesn't it it's a complete
re -evaluation of the workload and the tasks
done from start to finish Easier done from a
startup. If you're a marketing agency today and
you're thinking, right, we want to scale up and
we're currently one person, five people, 10 people,
whatever it may be. If you're a small agency,
you can think about redesigning your workflows
from the ground up. Much more difficult if you're
a 500 person manufacturing business with long
established workflows. And then you've got the
threat then of other people in your industry
going, well, actually we know how they manufacture
their product. If we can do all of the, let's
say the back office stuff, we can do the procurement,
the finance, the marketing, the sales. We'll
do that with agents, but we'll do the manufacturing
as is. You've got a competitor who can do what
you can do with 500 people, but they can do it
with say 100. And that changes the game. I'm
so glad you said that because there's two things
that spring to mind. The first one is once you
get up to scenario three and four, probably four.
You are looking at AI first companies that eat
the lunch of existing companies because retooling.
I've gone through those things like that phase
transitions easy. Oh, so it starts out and the
agents do a bit of the work and then it's like
by the end they do all of the work and. that's
that's maybe fine if there's like 10 people in
a company and they have to like adapt and they
get a decent timeline to do it what if you're
a thousand person company like that you know
humans are likely to resist this for for obvious
reasons plus the systems and processes of these
businesses will have and their and their data
and their tech stacks that are not augmented
for this it's so much easier to make that leap
if you just build it from scratch that way And
in theory, those organizations would be so much
more efficient and effective. They would eat
the lunch of the big old businesses easily, right?
They'd be like, oh, yeah, so we are able to achieve,
you know, 10x revenue per employee as you can,
as an example. So like, how quick does it take
to out -compete those businesses under those
conditions? Very, very easy to do. um one would
assume the other thing that this forgets is the
customers because if you're assuming that your
customers are humans then you you need we talk
the way we frame this is the efficiency gains
etc and i and i do think you know hyper personalization
of products and ads is obviously hopefully going
to be better for the for the customers but there
are a number of different things that can massively
shatter these scenarios where humans value human
products and output so much they're willing to
pay much more for things that humans crafted
and created it's like actually i don't i don't
want to buy something that was all robotics and
ai i want to work with a human like i want to
speak to a human on the phone those things could
emerge and completely disrupt all of this and
so if the customers don't get a better experience
this won't be as adopted as it sounds like it
obviously should be because ultimately if it's
still human spending the money then it's going
to be all about customer experience so i think
that's that's probably quite an interesting factor
the other thing i dug a bit deeper into is how
do we know where we are and what sort of things
should we look for if we want to be go if we
want to say oh scenario two's in the often should
probably start planning ahead with that in mind
so i had quite a good conversation with chat
gbt about that as well and we started sort of
digging into you know where are we um i'm not
going to describe now i think we all know where
we are right now but if we will know if things
are stalling if there's more indications that
this is a ai bubble and um you know earnings
of ai companies don't accelerate and money stops
going into the sector maybe regulation like the
eu ai act just makes it too hard to start personalizing
at scale and stuff like that would be quite useful
um but we'll be you know we will be moving into
scenario two if we start to see niche agents
that can actually deliver on a particular task
without any hand -holding like If HubSpot introduces
a social media posting agent where all you do
is review the copy before it goes out, we're
starting to drift into scenario one. If we start
to see Meta's pilots start to be successful,
if we see those case studies that show we're
able to gather leverage. and advertise based
on the data in these platforms and the humans
don't cry, no, you've destroyed my privacy. We're
starting to drift into, you know, scenario three
at that point. And from there, it's just about
how much better the agents get and what roles
the humans continue to play. It's interesting
you used the example of the HubSpot social...
agent that is actually an agent that they've
got in the offering at the moment a social posting
agent which will create the content for you based
on some keywords that's quite limited but we're
kind of at day one of this technology i think
literally this agent was launched in beta like
three months ago maybe not even that long so
really early days and at the limited use cases
but you can absolutely see as they become more
deeply integrated into a platform like hubspot
is you're all in one powwow so it has your social
posting it has all of your customer data where
you have fully integrated systems agents in that
environment should thrive and that should give
companies like hubspot or salesforce and other
platforms a huge advantage because when they
can both go off and do a small task like oh research
this topic and create some social posts but then
also manage the approval workflow the actual
schedule scheduling optimization and reporting
of all of that workflow then things start to
get um yeah very stage two as you you would say
yeah i think that's the key and um if you're
listening to this You've either been thinking
about this a lot or read some of this stuff already
and you're like, okay, that sounds interesting.
But, you know, we'll see how it plays out. Others
will be like, we've just scared the bejeebus
out of them. You know, let's not forget the data
centers that are being built right now are to
serve AI inference. that's agent swarm level
basically right that's where all these big build
outs are we're all going to want way more ai
access than we currently use and you might be
thinking to yourself well i use chachi pt quite
a lot every day already why do we need these
data's centers and it's because of this right
so that kind of shows you what they're they're
betting on there's a guy you and i follow on
the linkedins and on the whatsapps called ruv
martin who deploys agent swarms for coding requirements
and has shipped ridiculous amounts of working
code over the last 12 months by building development
agent swarms that collaborate together um so
these swarm things this is not like science fiction
idea that martin and i just found on a reddit
forum somewhere like people are building these
not for marketing but for other use cases and
so you know it's not unrealistic to think that
they will emerge so if we've bamboozled you and
hopefully we haven't but there are some things
that you can do and should do regardless of which
scenario comes to pass um some of the easy things
that you can do is absolutely if you're an individual
investing in your own ai training and becoming
you know an expert in these things is critical
and if you run a team invest in their training
because the the old adage it is old now i think
but you know um it's not marketers aren't replaced
by ai but they are replaced by marketers that
use ai um and so that's critical i think getting
your customer data in order so There is definitely
a world where privacy clampdown makes this hard
and that you can only rely on the first party
data that you have about customers. So how can
you secure opt -ins, gather data in a legal and
fair way and structure and store it in a way
that it's easy for AI models to draw upon as
inspiration and insight to help drive some of
these smart personalizations and automations
that we predict will happen in the future. In
line with that, you probably do need some sort
of AI ethics and usage charter, both to give
your customers trust in how you use AI and data,
but also to give guidance to your employees about
how they can use AI and data. And then starting
to build out some of those human in the loop
QA processes. Most people are starting to do
this. I think now this we talked previously,
Martin, about. work slop and how ai is brilliant
at writing stuff that makes no sense and how
important it is to have humans in the loop but
looking at how you can start to smart automate
aspects of processes with human touch points
you do this really beautifully martin and a number
of the automation tools that you've been using
but having those processes in hand will allow
you to maintain the quality that you need but
also Figure out where you can deploy an AI agent
as a particular NIS agent emerges. It's like,
oh, that bit doesn't have to be a human anymore.
It can be an agent instead. And then just be
testing tools or listening to podcasts like this
where we test the tools to figure out what those
capabilities look like as they actually emerge.
Things like look out for things like the AI coordinator.
If an agent appears. that can coordinate other
agents that is going to be a major trigger point
that everybody needs to keep an eye on and the
early version of that will probably be not dissimilar
to one of the use cases martin told us all about
where he was using manus to construct online
proposals where manus came up with the idea based
on some information martin gave it and built
this dynamic online experience it will probably
be these computer use agents that do some of
the first coordination of tasks as that gets
better expect to see true agents that can deploy
these things so um they're the things to watch
out for martin any thoughts on that big takeaway
for me is this is going to look very different
depending on the size of your organization and
the markets that you serve we talked about ai
managed campaigns that does hyper personalization
at scale great if you're a huge b2c consumer
brand with deep pockets then there's a huge amount
that you can go and you know facebook's massive
data set allows it to to test and orchestrate
ai campaigns at scale and you can kind of really
benefit from from that now and in the future
if you've got your own first party data it will
serve you well that's going to look very different
if you're a niche b2b manufacturing and engineering
company that realistically is speaking to an
audience of say 50 other companies in the world
so how you think about this is is going to change
i think if you are on that more niche b2b side
the episode that we had previously with harrison
talking about the role of ai in sales is probably
a really good starting point for you to go back
and listen to if you haven't heard that already
um but yeah i think it's going to look very different
for for different size organizations um as this
this whole thing develops i think that's a such
an important point and if you're listening to
this why not you know spin up claude chat gpt
give it the context about your business And ask
it to go through the process that I went through.
Right. And try and model out scenarios that are
going to be much more specific to your context.
That's probably the easiest way to get started.
You can even pull the transcript of this episode,
pull the bits that will be relevant and give
that as part of the context as well. Give it,
you know, give it some information about your
business. Give it some information about the
scenarios that we've been discussing and have
some fun pulling it apart, making it more appropriate
for you. You should never, you know, you shouldn't
take anything we've said here as red. This is
just us guessing of how these things could different
play out in the future. And certainly ChatGPT
can't predict the future either. But it might
give you ideas where your intuitive sense of
your customers, your market, your business was,
oh, I've already seen a few things going this
way. How can I capitalize on that? It can help
you build the types of if this, then that. scenario
plans that most small businesses just don't have
the time to build right you know martin and i
have both run small businesses we know that you're
busy flying the plane and building the plane
and and going through these types of processes
with an ai chatbot is you can do it in an hour
instead of having to you know take yourself out
your business for a week to really think deeply
on it as long as you keep that critical analysis
part of your brain very much engaged and you're
questioning everything that you think and that
the ai suggests and really like having both of
you criticize and analyze things to try and get
as close to robust ideas and experiments you
can run and stuff like that so all right bud
good to see you as always i'll speak to you soon
thank you for listening to artificially intelligent
marketing to stay on top of the latest trends
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