We were focused so much on generative AI in 2023 when ChatGPT came out, but I feel like there's so many better ways that artificial intelligence can be helping us. We have so much data on our customers and on our businesses that the human could never go through all of that data that we have. Finding the right insights, finding all these things that the human eye couldn't. And now AI can help us boil it down to a manageable, actionable data set.
Hi, this is the Marketing Meeting and I'm your host, Itir Eraslan. Every two weeks, I meet with experts and we talk about topics related to brands, marketing, and businesses, and sometimes add random lifestyle topics too. I hope you enjoy the show. Welcome to the Marketing Meeting. Today, my guest is Cathy McPhillips. Cathy is the Chief Growth Officer at Marketing AI Institute. She has a marketing background in leadership roles as well as content and digital marketing. Welcome, Cathy.
Well, thank you so much for having me. We've been waiting for this day.
Yes, yes, for a while. You have been traveling and you were quite busy as well as I was busy, but with the marketing conference that's coming up, although it's in September, but I assume that it's very busy out there.
Uh, we are in the thick of it right now, so yes, it's, it's exciting.
Uh, so you are leading growth efforts for the AI Academy for marketers and the annual marketing AI conference that is coming up in September. Uh, so I'm sure that you have a lot of insights on what's going on around AI and marketing in the industry. How do you see the role of AI in marketing nowadays, especially, you know, within the context of your role at the Marketing AI
Well, it's interesting because, you know, when I came onto the institute, my job was really to grow our academy, to grow the business, to have attendees come to the event. And what I realized is like, Oh my gosh, I can use AI for a lot of things for my own role.
Actually, I consider myself one of our customers because I, I just keep learning all these things as You know, Paul and Mike are talking about things as we hear about new technologies, people in our community and slack when they are talking about things. I'm just learning so much. So I think that I'll use me as my, as the example of, you know, where I see the role in marketing, but it's really just helping me in a few areas.
If something is data driven, if something is trying to make a prediction, if something is repetitive or generative. You know, if it's one of those things, there probably is an AI tool to help augment the work that I'm doing. So we're putting it through that lens. And, um, and as I've realized, there's a lot of places where all those things are taking place.
So it's been really interesting over the past 30 years of my career, all the different things that I'm doing that now I'm looking back saying, Gosh, AI would have been really useful for that project 10 years ago. Um, so it's been fun to, to learn new things and to. Not only just have some efficiency gains or fill a knowledge gap or a skill gap, but actually do stronger work.
So which areas of marketing do you believe AI will make the most significant impact in the coming year ahead? I'm not asking like two, three years because we know that is like a very long scope for AI, but at least for the year ahead, what's in front of us?
Yeah, let's hope this will be for a year because it might just be two or three months and then something else will happen. Yeah, but I would say, you know, we were focused so much on generative AI in 2023 when chat GPT came out, it made us all realize, Oh, that's AI. And I actually, that's a tangible example. So I really can understand what artificial intelligence is capable of. But I think that's actually one of the easiest.
I don't know how to put this, but I feel like there's so many better ways that artificial intelligence can be helping us, whether it's from a data standpoint. We have so much data on our customers and on our businesses that the human could never go through all of that data that we have. Finding the right insights, finding the right anomalies, finding all these things that the human eye. couldn't identify. And now AI can help us, you know, boil it down to a manageable, actionable data set.
Um, I think that's one big way. And actually we've been using AI a lot for our strategies. It's helping us think deeper, ask the AI questions that, you know, we're thinking about surfacing some answers, helping us come up with a framework, And some initial thoughts from a strategy standpoint, and then we can go in and use our minds and be creative and add to it. But it's really giving us a great starting point for a lot of our strategy as well.
I used to work at Nike for many years, and then back then, you know, when we were launching Nike Plus, which is like the running app, and you know, there was so much, you know, consumer data coming in for the first time to Nike. And we were collecting so many data, although there is like a data science team who was at that time. You know, harnessing that data. I'm working on the data, but as the leadership, we were not sure which data would be useful for us.
So, you know, uh, in that case, what are some of the challenges that you see, especially in AI application or let's say data science, data analysis on so on? Because analyzing, being able to analyze is one thing. And how you prompt and how you direct the AI to analyze something is another thing. So that's why I would like to. Ask if there are some common challenges that you see at the industry right now.
Well, I think you hit on a really important point and it's like we have so much data and where do you start? So I think that just reiterates that humans aren't going away. Humans are still very much needed in this process because it's trying to figure out what is the output we're going for, what is, what do we want our data to surface?
Um, so it's humans, using our minds, working with our teams, figuring out what our customers are really going for and then using the tools to help us pull some of that information. And we want to make sure that we are being the best stewards of the data because we need to protect our customers and protect our businesses. I wouldn't take your data set and dump it into a tool without knowing the implications of where is that data going? What model is it training and things like that.
But there are ways to anonymize some of the data and to put it into some of these tools and say, what do you see? What are some trends that are surfacing that the human eye may not recognize? And how might I be able to take action on some of these data points? So I think there's a few ways to look at it. And that's coming from me as a marketer and a writer and not a data scientist.
So I'm sure that the data scientists and the analysts We'll look at that in a completely different lens, in a much stronger lens that I'm looking at. But just from my point of view, I think there are some very easy things we could be doing with our data that we aren't doing just because we don't, it's like it's analysis paralysis. We have so much stuff. Like how do we even begin? And I think AI tools can help us in a lot of those areas.
One of the things that I'm asked a lot about, you know, there are so many. areas that you can use and adopt AI. And since everyone is just now, um, curious to understand, I'm also anxious to get started and there are so many tools out there because it's not only about chat GPT or open AI or Gemini or so on, but it's like most of the software tools that are available for businesses have AI in their back.
So when companies are adopting AI technologies, is there anything that you can recommend to them? to start up with or what do you see as a common thing in the industry right now?
I think chat 4, I think it's still the strongest starting point for a lot of folks. Um, and I highly would recommend the 20 a month to get the plus access. I think it's such a stronger product, but I think the way that we like to start is looking at particular use cases. So starting with something really small, small and actionable. So instead of looking at a tool and saying, I'd like to onboard this tool and I'd like to see how it could fit into our organization.
I think a better approach is to flip it and say, where are we struggling? Where are we spending a lot of time? And go through and identify all of your use cases. And one of the things I talk about a lot is our podcast. I produce our podcast and there's about 15 steps in there. So we listed all of them out and we said, where are some places that AI could assist us along the way?
And one of the things for me when I talked about, um, a knowledge gap earlier was I'm editing our videos with no prior video editing experience. And I'm using a tool to assist me there. So, it's saving me time, it's saving us money from having to outsource to somebody else. And I have no problem with outsourcing things if we need them to. We still need the professionals, like I mentioned. But because our format for the podcast is news, I need to go quick.
I need to, when Mike and Paul are done recording, we need to get that podcast edited and posted quickly because it is so news and time sensitive. We need to speed up that process. So AI is in a lot of, uh, A lot of the steps through our podcast process is able to help us get that out faster and more efficiently and do some things that it helps us, you know, things like making short form videos for YouTube or for Paul uploading a raw video file linked in with a short snippet.
Like we can do all those so quickly with artificial intelligence. So really finding a specific use cases for someone to go in and test and go to their management and say. Here was my problem, or here was my use case. I used this tool, and here were the results. I think if you're able to show a tangible result of sales growth, or time saved, or things like that, then management is more likely to say, Oh, well, what else can we be doing? Just takes that first step to get started.
Perfect. Uh, I will come back to the tools that you are using at the very end, but before that, I have another question. Um, are there, since you have so much visibility to the industry right now, are there any innovative, uh, use cases of AI in marketing that you see nowadays and, or a company or a brand, uh, case?
I think some of the things I really I'm enjoying right now are seeing how creative people are being with some of the tools. People are using You know, say they want to generate an image and they need to write a prompt to put into the image generator, but they don't know how to write the prompt. So they're actually using a JET GPT or generative AI tool to help them craft the prompt to then take that prompt to put it in the mid journey or dolly or runway. So they're using the tools.
to help each other, which I think is really neat.
So they are asking Chachapiti to create the prompt for mid journey, you mean? Yes. Okay. I haven't heard that. I mean, I saw all these templates in LinkedIn and people are sharing like fixed templates for prompting and so on, but I've never heard that.
So, you know, if you want to create this image, but you're not the creative type and you're trying to figure out how do I, how do I say this the way I want to say it, instead of just saying, I would like a blue background with this with a house on it and I'm trying to represent a post or something else you could kind of almost even plug your blog post into a tool and say what kind of prompt should I give a generative, um, an image tool to kind of
really encapsulate what I'm trying to say and taking that and using it in the tool. So using the tools together. I think is really neat. Um, what else? There's there are so many cool things that we're seeing. I think a lot of the things that I'm seeing are with where are in the data area and just trying to surface and identify some opportunities for, um, there's so many things as marketers that we are trying to do in a day and using these tools to help us.
Prioritize, I think, is a really helpful way to do it. And one use case I just had, I was writing a presentation for an event I was speaking at a few months ago, and I had a beginning story to kick off the presentation, and then I had my whole presentation, and I just couldn't figure out how to bridge the gap, how to segue from my opening story into The rest of my presentation. So I put it into one of the tools and I said, here's how I'm starting. Here's how I'd like to finish.
Here's the outcome I'm going for. Can you help me bridge the gap from these two parts of the presentation? Absolutely. Here you go. And it was so good. So it's nice. It's like that creative brainstorming partner that, you know, we all wish we had on our side. Um, yeah.
Yeah, I completely agree with you. I mean, this week, there were some really random things that I couldn't, you know, make up my mind. I know that even at the time that I, you know, pay attention to prompt the chat GPT, I would have written that even myself, but you know, I didn't have that mental capacity to do that. So I was just like, I said, Okay, I'll just open the chat GPT and just get the help. And it was like, It was very quick. I agree. And sometimes
it gives you really bad answers that might spark an idea though. So it is useful, just like any brainstorming session. Sometimes there are some really funny ideas that come out of brainstorming sessions that would never come to fruition, but it might trigger you to think about something else. And I think these AI tools are very similar.
Um, is there a difference between the approaches of B2B and B2C marketing, um, when they are using AI tools? Because Many of the better and advanced AI examples that I'm seeing right now is around B2B. And I'm just looking for the time that B2C marketers are also tapping into the AI technology in a different world.
I think one of the things I see that B2C are doing a lot more than B2B, or maybe that's just from my purview, is like recommender engines. So you look at Spotify and Netflix and, Even clothing, you know, if I'm on, if I'm on an online e commerce site and I click on something, I get all these recommendations based on things I'm looking at, pages I'm staying on for a long time, an item that I might click. And I think a lot of the B2C brands, companies are able to build that model out.
And I know that we can do that from a B2B as well, but I think it's just a little bit more visible from a B2C standpoint. So I think, I think that's one area, but I think that we're all just trying to do the same thing. You know, I think a lot of these tools can, even though we're, we're in different, you know, B2C and B2B are very different. I think the tools can be used the same way across.
Um, I mean, when you said that it's the recommendation tools, I recognize that it's now so embedded into our lives that I forgot that there is like AI running behind when they are recommending those things. And I never thought about that, which is like, that's why, but nowadays, like many, all the people that are talking about marketing and AI is from B2B brands.
That's why I was just like, if there is any, if you see any kind of more, uh, affinity from B2B or B2C, but yeah, it's, Answered my question already. So at the marketing AI Institute, so there's an annual conference that's happening in September. Uh, but other than that, do you also do educations or, uh, like some other support areas that you give there? Yes,
so we're an a media event and education company, and our goal really is to make a I accessible and approachable for marketers. So just come in. Let us tell you what artificial intelligence is, how it can help you in your business. We're not trying to say a I. Should replace all, you know, do all these things for you. We really want to make sure that, you know, that AI is here. It's not going away. How can we help you embed it in your organization, augment some of the work that you're doing.
And in fact, our entire team, none of us are data scientists. We are journalism majors. We are marketers, we are editors. So we are more on the arts. side of it versus the data science side. So we'd come into with that lens of how can we just help you do your job better. So media companies side, we have blog posts, webinars, eBooks, research, things like that, and those are all free. We've got a great intro to AI class that Paul and I run once a month.
And then after the intro class, which is part of our education, we also have some other options like a piloting AI course, we've got a mastery membership that we just launched last month, and then from an event standpoint, we've got make on our marketing AI conference in September, and then we also have a few virtual summits we do throughout the year just to keep Bye. Bye. People inform, you know, as, as we talked about, things are changing so quickly.
So for us only to have Macon once a year, there's so much that's happening that we just want to make sure that people know about it. I'd also want to recommend, um, our podcast it's called the AI show and it's what I use every, every day. week to keep stay on top of the news because there's just so much information and it's hard to really figure out, you know, what do I need to pay attention to? Why should I care? What should I be reading?
And Paul and Mike just do it all for me and tell me what, what's important. So it's nice to have that one hour every Tuesday to catch up on AI news.
When you do those events and like podcast recordings and so on, and also for the MyComp planning, are there like. areas that people are most interested in learning about AI. It can be about, you know, the applications and strategy, or it can be about generative AI going forward. Is there like a segmentation of topics that people pay quite a lot of attention or quite interested to hear?
Oh, I think from the podcast standpoint, it really is helped me synthesize all this news for me because I don't have the time to do it. Um, from. Like a CMO and marketing leader standpoint, I think they're looking mostly for education and training and also trying to figure out how does this fit into my day? I'm already exceeding my 40 hours a week. I'm so busy. I'm managing a team. I'm trying to make sure that my job is safe.
And now you want me to talk about AI and somehow use put AI into everything that we're doing. And how can you find the time? So it's trying to enable, um, CMOs and marketing leaders to Infuse it into their organization and here are some steps that you could take to do it in a slow and steady way.
There was one, uh, funny incident that I had with my sister, uh, like a creative way of using AI. Uh, I gave her a gift in December for her birthday, uh, about like, uh, um, you know, astrology, uh, reading of her charts, uh, and then, you know, it was voice recording and she was on the phone and then the person sends the voice recording later on for her charts.
And then she put that sound to AI and then got the script transcript and then put the transcript to chat GPT and saying that, can you please highlight the things and then also make sure that I have a calendar update for the dates that are important for me. Because I was like, when I was listening to, I would probably take notes, you know, and I said, I mean, you are older than me. I should be telling these stories. to you, not to you, are you telling these things to me?
And so it was like a very creative way of her. So, um, to wrap up with, uh, what are some of the like top AI tools that you recommend, uh, to marketers, especially to the ones that are just starting up, uh, with, you know, exploring AI and adopting AI in their, uh, marketing management space.
Yeah, I mentioned, um, chat GPT. I think that's just a very easy place to start. And there are a lot of places you can turn to that. I really truly believe that from a prompting standpoint, you really need to get in there and do it yourself to figure out how best to approach it. But there are a few people, um, Allie Miller and then Christopher Penn, they both of them have prompting guides and it just gives you a framework on how you could personally start it.
So I would check those out and I can send you those links if you want to put them in the show notes, which is helpful to kind of figure out how to frame your prompts. And then from there you can look at other tools. There is Claude, there is Perplexity, which I really like Perplexity right now. Google Gemini. So they're all very similar. They all have, I think, their pros and cons. I like to test them out at the same time just to see what's giving me the best results. Uh, I love Descript.
Descript is my favorite. That's what I'm using for video. But if you're not using video, then I wouldn't go by Descript just because of me. I would make sure you have a use case for it.
Yeah.
For the podcast, what do you use? Uh, rather than the, the script, we use Descript, we use another company called Opus Clip. It helps us create short form videos from our long form video. So I upload the podcast, I, we do the MP4 because we also do it on video, put that into Opus Clip. And it takes about 15 minutes and it gives me eight to 10 short form videos that we can use. And it does it in a vertical format so you can put them on YouTube shorts or Instagram stories or TikTok.
And what it does, it uses AI to not only clip the videos, but it uses AI to go through that hour, identify the best moments that best represent the podcast. So it's not just random sentences throughout, it's going through and figuring out what are the best parts to clip. So I would say of the eight to 10 we get. Maybe six to seven are usable. We don't use them all, but it's a great starting point for us.
You know, then we can go to, we can add our branding at our colors, do some other work to it. So it's great.
Yeah. I mean, like even getting like two or three clips out of a podcast interview is, I think, amazing, uh, I haven't used Opus Clip before. I, I'm going to give it a try and I'll also put them on the, uh, show notes as well, uh, like all the suggestions, also Christopher's name, which, uh, you know, he's the one who recommended that I talk to you together with Lisa Adams. Uh, so with Lisa, I talked about Applied AI just a few days ago, uh, which we are going to launch, uh, soon. Uh, so.
At the end, I usually ask two questions. I mean, generally it's because of my, uh, curiosity. Uh, one of them is if there is one business book that you would recommend, what would it be? Well, I have
three.
Oh, okay. Even
better. I have them next to me. I have, I was prepared because I knew, I know listening to your podcast that you ask these questions. So Paul and Mike's book, the marketing artificial intelligence, um, AI marketing in the future of business. That's by Paul Reitzer and Mike Kaput.
Uh, my friend Jenny Magic wrote a book called Change, and the reason I like this book is because, you know, with all this talk about AI and technology, we need to make sure there are people in the organization that are leading this, and that are the change agents in the organizations to do so. And also there's a big part in here about, you know, understanding how our teammates work. So we don't all work the same way. So just understanding people's feelings.
This is a very volatile time with people. Some people are on board and some people aren't. And how can we work together to respect each other's feelings and move forward in a positive way together? And then lastly, my friend Scott Stratton and Alison Stratton wrote a book called, uh, I
didn't know that they've written a new book on marketing, uh, but I didn't know that they had, oh, okay. That's good.
It's very good. It just, it's one of those books that a lot of it, I feel like we know how we should be leading. But it's just one of those things you're like, Oh my gosh, you're right.
You know, Is it like, um, usually with the Gen Z or, you know, on leadership within the era of AI or song or AI
specific, it's just how to be the best managers. We can, the best leaders, how we can. Take care of our teams, what we want, you know, our legacy to be in the world. And just things like that, you know, like I said, things that we inherently know, but just hearing some of the stories they've collected over the years and some experiences they've had and some things not to do.
Wow. Yeah. I mean, especially about the AI book that you recommended, which was the author was Mike Caput and, uh, and Paul Reiter. Yeah. And then I mean, like with those books, I assume that, uh, like there's a time bond because, you know, by the time you write a book, uh, it's mind that some of the things may not be relevant. So, I mean, it's a brave, uh,
Yeah, I think it's a good, it's a very, it's a still relevant book because it's basically giving you a little bit of the history, a little bit of the why, some frameworks that I think are evergreen. So sure, there are a couple things that, you know, could be updated at this point, but I think You know, 80, 90 percent of it is still very relevant and timely. It's really built on the whys and the hows to get started and not so much on technologies specifically.
Because I've been thinking about AI since, okay, with generative AI in the last year, people think that AI is just here for a, for a year. But there are two things. I mean, my first client in my own business, they were an AI company and it was six years ago. And then I was like already knowing, okay, I'm in, AI is with us for so many years that I thought that it was like the big new thing. It was six years ago.
So, I mean, thinking about that, you know, having a book in AI doesn't necessarily need to be like only the technical things about it, but it's the strategical things because it's there for many years. And the second thing is that we are now working on an art and AI project with my current client. And they started, the artists started the art and AI collaborations.
It's almost three years ago, you know, I mean, they were doing some, uh, you know, prompting and they were doing some art installations and so on. So I mean, thinking about that AI feels like it's new, like it's, Oh, everything happened like in one year, but indeed it's not the case.
There is this amazing exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Art, which if you come to Cleveland in September, I will take you there. It is, it is the, one of the best museums in the whole entire world. And they have an art lens gallery, which is AI powered. And there's all these different. hands on parts of this gallery. So you could, you could go up to this big wall, you could go up and you can just put a square on it.
Like you can use your finger and it will surface art in the museum that has that shape in it. You could do a squiggly line, you could do a triangle. And they've basically Had AI learn about all of these different pieces of art. It could be even something in the, the armory, like in the court. So it doesn't need to be just paintings. It could be anything in the, in the museum. It's remarkable. Um, so that's, that's really good. Um, experience.
But is there like, maybe, I mean, forgive me if I don't know it, but now there's like the AI conference in Cleveland, there is a museum that is focused on AI in Cleveland. Is, is there a reason to that? I mean, uh, that Cleveland has a specific AI place in the history? Um, no, but we're trying to get it
to, to be somewhere that, you know, is a center for a lot of things. You know, we're all, so, you Paul and our most, our whole entire team, you know, started in Cleveland, five of us are in Cleveland. Our two new hires actually are both out of town, but the company is staying in Cleveland. So that's why the event is here. And there's a lot of really smart people here. You know, there's a lot of tech is important in Ohio.
So I mean, like mine in
Cleveland, why
should
we go for coffee? Well, interestingly, in December, my niece opened up a coffee shop. Oh, really? She did. Her name is Emily and it's called Emily's and it's, it's great. It's, it's become this place, uh, that on the weekends they don't allow laptops because every table is just bustling with people having conversations with their friends and their family. And, uh, you go in there, you can't get a seat. I go in there every Saturday morning just to say hi, and it's just lines out the door.
People are, everyone's happy. People are talking to each other. And the coffee's really good. My niece makes all of her own everything.
So it's fresh
and it's, you know, it's just, it's delicious.
Wow. I mean, then that means that when I'm in Cleveland, hopefully in September, I mean, I know that you will be so busy, but the two things to do is to go to the Cleveland Museum and to Emily's as well. Get our coffees, then go to the museum. Exactly. I mean, if you are so busy, I'll bring coffee from Emily's to you over to you and then, you know, help you out with the conference. Thanks so much, uh, Cassie.
And um, it's a pleasure to meet you and to talk to you and I hope we can see each other in person soon. Yes. I can't wait.