#86: Practical Use Cases for AI in Marketing Today - with VMWare, Jasper, Tomorrow.io

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We're now live. It's 12:00 clock Eastern Time. We're gonna let people roll in. Do me a favor. As you're rolling in and as you're watching this, listening to this, wherever you are, put your name in the chat and let us know where you're writing in from. People must know the drill because they're already writing. Lauren's in Boston. Sean's in Alberta. Erica's in la. Danielle's in New Orleans. Dave is in Boston. Jen is in Newport. I know. Jessica is here in Toronto. Kelly, where are you at?

I'm actually in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

P. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. That's where my sister lives. She says the gateway to the Midwest. Is that true?

Exactly. They say there's no way that's true.

There's no way that's true. She's like, look at where Pittsburgh is on the map, buddy. Where are you? Austin, Texas. Austin, Texas. Your namesake.

Austin and Austin.

Beautiful. And I'm in Vermont.

Will ever let me live that down? Every time. They always say Austin. How long you been living in Austin for?

That would be my nightmare. That's when I just go straight up, resting face and I'm like, don't. I just give you the look like, don't talk to me. I'm not in this Uber to talk right now. Please no talking. All right, everybody's here. We're going to kick this thing off. There's a bunch of people here live. This will be recorded. One of the rules on every Exit 5 session that we do is if you write into the chat, if you ask if this is going to be recorded, you have to then send us a video later of you doing 100 burpees and running two miles. So do not ask in the chat if this will be recorded. It obviously will be recorded and you will get the recording. Now we've said it, We've done our housekeeping. We can move on. All right, let's go around the room really quickly and talk to this awesome little panel that we got together. Megan had a last minute family situation and so Austin is filling in for her. Luckily, we've already vetted him. He's been a highly popular guest on the Exit 5 podcast. So let's go, Austin. Jessica, Kelly, quick intro who you are. What do you do?

Hey, Austin Distel, lead marketing innovation at Jasper. Been here since the start of it and have gotten to see it grow. So I can speak to kind of the the evolution of generative AI over the last few years as a marketer.

Yeah, that's me, Jess Correa.

I'm with VMware. I lead a team of eight content strategists and marketers within our global demand team. We're really out there to connect the right audiences to the right content at hopefully the right time within our global demand programs that we activate with our geo field marketing leaders. And I also founded our marketing AI Council back in February and lead that team of now 27 cross functional, mostly marketers in our organization driving our AI strategy.

We're going to come back to that and real quick. Just I just want to give a shout out because it's not often that you get to speak in front of a room of all other marketers. But Jessica is doing the ultimate hustle right now, which is taking the webinar call in her hotel room while at the company event, which is many of us have done that here. So shout out to you. All right, Kelly, you're up.

Yeah, so I'm Kelly Peters. I'm director of marketing at Tomorrow IO. We are a weather intelligence and climate adaptation platform and we are building the next generation of weather forecasting. So yeah, as director of marketing, you know, I'm responsible for making sure we have the right go to market plans in place for all of our various sales divisions and touch a lot of different parts of that along with my amazing team. And we're lean. So we are really diving into AI like super proactively and yeah, just super excited to be talking about this with this group today.

There's no greater code word for we gotta do a lot of things with not a lot of people and not a lot of resources than saying that we're lean.

Lean. You picked up on that. Yeah, it's a good one.

It was the way you delivered it. All right, so let's talk about each of you. Like how today we're going to talk about practical use cases of AI. I've seen a lot of chatter in the Exit 5 community and just around that there is a lot of talk about AI, But I think what we want to try to accomplish in this hour today is to bridge the gap a little bit and give people some frameworks to think about, some actual ideas. I think there's a lot of buzz and chatter about AI, but people want to know like beyond the generic stuff and actually before we get into that, Austin, I would love to have kind of if you could re. We talked about this on a previous podcast, but if you could just rehash this a little bit. You said something to me like a lot of marketers are right now are making the mistake of kind of feeding, you know, whether it's Jasper or Chat GPT or Bard or whatever, we see what's happening. We see a lot of people talking about generative AI. We feed Jasper a bunch of, you know, kind of like low level stuff and we get an average answer back and we're like, oh, this thing sucks. Can you just kind of talk about that for a minute? Because that is kind of the standard that I see across the board in marketing right now.

Yeah, well, you know what, we're all exercising a new muscle. If you have never given directions to somebody, if you are like an individual contributor and then you just recently got to manager, imagine you finally got an assistant and you gave that assistant just a one sentence direction. How good of the job would they do? And so you've got to give a really thorough description of what you want. And the better your directions, the better quality of output you're going to get from your AI assistant. Now you think about that over time you're going to grow your language skills with AI. How to prompt prompt engineering has kind of become this Reddit Twitter name these days. And at Jasper we focus on, you don't have to be that we enhance prompts, but this is your job as a marketer to say, well, what am I really trying to get out of this? Am I looking for a direct response ad or more of a, you know, inspirational branding positioning? You know, is this a cold lead or is this a current customer? You got to understand the nuances to what you're describing, what the AI should say. So ultimately what you got to get out of that, the punchline is better your input, better your output.

Austin. It reminds me of that time when you're a little kid and you have to in school give instructions on how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. And ultimately the teacher standing in front of the room reading your instructions and like puts the bread, like they don't know what to do with the bread so they like drop it on the right. Or it's like it doesn't work because you didn't give the right specific instructions. I think that's a really cool analogy to think about it too. And Jasper's prompt enhancer in and of itself is a really good educational tool in terms of like what you can put in clicking that prompt enhancer for any of the customers that are out there or people thinking about it. And then seeing what it blows out to just in its own educational form has been really helpful for our teams.

Yeah, I just saw this in the chat also to vote on that. So first off, have just started exploring that feature of Jasper also prompt perfect. If you guys have heard of that, that's been a big one for our team. It's such an investment of time up front of like putting the human touch on the input. But it is so worthwhile for then getting a 10x on the output versus spending time trying to edit something that's like half baked coming out of it. There's such a point of diminishing return that you can very quickly reach just trying to edit something that you haven't optimized before putting it in.

And here's beautiful. I was going to ask you all like just for resources on that so people are like I hear you on the prompt engineering. Awesome. Before you go with what you were going to say. So you can do this in Jasper already. That's great. What is prompt perfect? I just plugged it in. It looks like it's a plugin of some kind.

Yeah. So it's a SaaS web based platform that we're using a lot. So you take your prompt, put it in directly and it optimizes it for you. And then I'm taking that and putting it right now into GPT for example. But I think you can put it hypothetically into any tool and it actually optimizes for whatever tool you're using too. It's been really, really helpful, if nothing else just in teaching our team. I'm not going there every time now, but it's training me as an inputter, as a human of how to better optimize my prompts before even getting there.

Exactly what I was going to go with there is it's called seasoning the chat. And this means like what information do you need to give context to before you even start prompting? Let's say that you're trying to like do an ebook campaign or something like this, like a webinar campaign. You need to first give it the brief of what you're about to start requesting from it. Like create an email promoting this webinar or create an ad sequence, something like that. To do it, it needs to know what it's promoting first. And so if you're using ChatGPT, that audience would say it's called seasoning the chat. We have like a knowledge upload or like a link upload, but you need to give it that context first because the number One thing, people get frustrated with AI. We polled audiences at our Generative AI conference. We said, what do you hate about AI? Right now, the number one answer, factually inaccurate. And so when they're in context to that, when we double dived into that, double clicked into what? Factually inaccurate. It's often not about news or updates like recent activity. It's more about themselves, their own company, their own products. It's an internal inaccuracy. And so you gotta upload and give a brief about what you're about to prompt.

Well, and I've seen this, I've seen people talk about this, but like if you're using a generative AI tool and treating it like Google, you're not going to be successful. And so like you go to Google and you say like, who won the world series in 2007? That's a fact. You know you're going to get a fact back right to the point you. Did you see this in the chat? This is from Corley. To replace a little AI humor I saw from graphic designers. To replace graphic designers with AI, clients will need to accurately describe what they want so we're safe.

It's so true. Don't you feel like that's almost the biggest like objection that I do here is like, no way, it's not good enough. You'll definitely need humor. It's like, of course, yeah, no, no doubt. We're not saying it's going to replace us. I don't think any marketer thinks like 100%, but if we optimize the inputs then we can help it along the way for better outputs.

All right, there's a good question in here from Samantha about measurement and I have it and we're going to come back to it. But Jessica, you mentioned, I'm curious to hear at what point you being a marketer became keen to this and brought this into the company. Because you just said sometimes in the last year you started this marketing AI council at VMware. VMware is obvious, obviously a massive company, but like you must have been ear to have the. For, you know, most people here are like, I just want to start using something you've already created. This AI council, take us into like the. Why did you create that? What was the purpose of doing it? I'm just curious to hear like kind of all the way back to why you started this and what, what's the point of it and how this group meets and all the stuff in there.

Yeah, and we'll go into that a little bit and I have a whole session at Macon coming up in July too on how to start an AI console that we can get more of the nitty gritty there too. But last summer I took a Kellogg like Northwestern executive education class on digital marketing and AI and all that. And I remember specifically they had some AI platforms in there that we watched videos on and I remember specifically Jasper was one of them. This is a the origin story if you will and cut down. But I even texted a couple of my colleagues and friends at different businesses and says, especially smaller companies saying you guys really need to look into this. I thought there's no way a company like VMware is going to be able to onboard a tool like this. It takes like, feels like three years to onboard new companies. And so we actually started looking at a tool like this. It started more in our product led growth team which is like more of a startup style team in VMware and some of that and those people came onto my team and we started building a use case for Jasper and actually spent from October through January onboarding Jasper and building a use case around it to create new content to supplement agency content creation and agency spend internally within a pilot in our global demand team. And really quickly we found out that you know, how powerful it was. So this was pre chatbots actually. Then of course we had chatgpt in late year Christmas break January kind of all blows up and it's starting to get out somehow and I'm getting messages from people inside the organization saying are you guys using Jasper? And I just realized that there's a lot this group of people that really went in hard and fast on Generative AI quickly with all the news and hubbub if you will and just said do you guys think we should all get together? So we started to get together one day and we called it Marketing AI Council. And we said, is this a good idea? Do you think we should do this? And everyone of course said yes. And then I said how often do you guys think we should meet? And everybody's answer was weekly. Because monthly the space is moving way too fast. You know, you can't wait any longer than a week to get together. And so it just started as this really ground up, you know, group of passionate marketers that wanted to dive deeply into this space. And then we quickly realized as an organization we needed guidelines for using Gen AI in writing. At VMware, the brand team was incredibly involved and spearheaded a lot of this. So actually and we formalized as a council in February we launched our guidelines in March. And then we have a really steady drumbeat of internal enablement and building this cross functional team. We are connected with it now with legal, with our office of the cto. There's a corporate AI council now that references how ahead marketing is in the game of putting all of this together. And so it's really just getting this finding who those passionate people are. We're all doing this on top of our day jobs. But it's so exciting, so fascinating, moving so quickly that we don't mind, you know, putting it together. And now we're in a space where we're trying to push these pilots, push these use cases, working really closely with our marketing technology team and we're expanding Jasper across our entire global marketing team because that's how passionate we are. Our leadership is now luckily our chief marketing officer about giving a access to AI for all of our team members. It is incredibly fascinating to see the use cases that are coming out of it too because there are things I would never think about because I don't have the jobs of all 650 marketers in VMware. And so that is the most fascinating part. Every day I talk to somebody new and they use it in a completely different way than I ever thought of.

Love that. So I want to flip over to Kelly because you have on one end of the spectrum you have VMware with 35 something thousand employees and then you have. Which is, this is amazing by the way, because I think if I was in marketing right now I would be betting my career on this in this way where like what you're doing basically is you're forcing. Well, you have a group of people who raise their hands. So you're not forcing them but you're saying like let's all try to creatively use this tool. I don't know how we're going to use it, but let's staple this on top of my job. And how can this help me do this and how can this help me do that? Which I think is such a good approach to pushing yourself to use this. Kelly, flip over to you with a leaner marketing operation like where did you all bring AI into your company? For those that are out there more on the smaller end of the startup scene.

Yeah, definitely. So to set the scene here we are a team of five at tomorrow on the marketing side, five full time. And so we started out actually I started with Jasper about a year ago, maybe October or something. And I came to it for content exclusively. We have a number of different sales divisions. So we are supposed to supporting a number of different verticals, way different Personas, way different target markets. And so I found Jasper for the customization I would write, you know, create a really nice broad top of funnel piece and then I would use it to customize it per vertical, then distribute that out to our internal teams, you know, all of that good stuff. So that's how we started and what we've really been able to do is focus first and foremost on using it for efficiency's sake. Like we are a small team. We are squeezing as much automation juice out of AI as possible. Just all of like the day in and day out rote tasks that as marketers we are, they have to happen. But like can we do them faster? And the answer is yes. So that's first and foremost. But we also are very much using it as a strategic partner I would say and a lot of it comes cross functionally. So Jessica, like you're saying, definitely resonates as a company we really are going to market together with AI. I'm learning from our product team a lot about ways that we are infusing generative AI into our product that we then operationally taking back to marketing and vice versa. So I would say as a lean team, efficiency first and foremost. Strategically we are learning so much when we work cross functionally as an entire company going into this ecosystem and just sharing insights. I just made a note that we should actually have a council Jessica meet weekly. We have like a group Slack channel that's very lively but like if you, you skip a week to your point, like you miss something. So just cross functional conversation, external conversation, that's how we stay on top of it. We've also hired an AI marketer which I can jump into now unless we should wait. But as I mentioned we were, we were diving into AI tools and what we found very quickly was we recognized the power of it. We could already see like in the Jasper use case I explained how it could help us to scale content production. We saw how it could help with the automation of going through data, mass sets of data, things like that. And so we knew we needed someone who could come into the team and make an impact really quickly. And beyond just that, we saw how quickly the ecosystem was evolving and we wanted someone who could keep us on the cutting edge. So as we were looking for this new headcount, it's like we could go really specialized into a product marketer for example, which would be great. Or we could go just content. You go through all of the different functions but when we considered our bandwidth and our goals, it made much more sense for us to get almost a Swiss army knife of a person, as I'm calling Ruth Favela, who we found and I believe is here and is just fantastic. And her role is to certainly execute with AI. But of equal importance is tell us what's going on out there in the ecosystem so that we can improve current processes, better understand our current AI tool stack and how we can change it. And she's bringing it not just in the marketing team, but cross functionally. We're now doing an AI hackathon. And so it was really about not just hiring a marketer, but creating a foundation for broader AI adoption across the organization and investing in it today so that we really can scale across the company tomorrow.

How did you find this mythical AI marketer? Did you just like Google that? Like, how did you find this person?

Yeah, should have brought Ruth off of mute.

But no, you got to stop saying her name. Everyone's going to message her as they should.

As they should. Yeah. So great question. I mean it had never been done before, to be honest. We had never done it. And as we went out into the market, we found that no one else was doing it at the time. So we wrote a fairly broad job description, I'll be honest, and said we're kind of looking for a generalist and we know that AI is part of the future and that this person can and will use it.

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And it was so interesting. The hiring process, hearing the different ways that people interpreted it and envisioned then the path that it could take was just in itself. That process was fascinating. Some people thought that we should potentially just use that role to market our own AI and that person would be best fit to just focus on certain features of the product. Other people thought that they would in fact just be a prompt engineer and you know, they would just like own the tech stack and what Ruth keep saying her name, but what she and we envisioned was this person who was doing both, to be honest, but really leaning on AI to do it and being the human touch in it all. So she like manages our tech stack. Everything I just mentioned. But yeah, to answer your question, it's like it was fairly broad. It's something that hadn't been done before and we through the process like refined it based on each person's vision.

I think about this a lot too, especially in my company, just for a different point of view too is do you hire somebody to drive AI or does AI become part of everyone's job. If it's an AI assistant, it could be assisting all of our positions in very different ways. And we already have, for example at VMware, an enablement team in marketing. So then that enablement team just turns into enabling AI education, AI literacy, responsible AI ethical AI, which we're very passionate about deepening at VMware. And then from a content strategy perspective, it becomes AI driven content strategy, AI driven audience insights. It just becomes a part of the stack if you have the ability to educate your teams and get everybody up to speed. Speed as well. So I love that you guys did this, Kelly. But I also think another approach is it's just like digital marketing. It's a part of the job going forward. And I think that's the near future too.

Totally.

Qualities of like these AI powered marketers, there's two characteristics that we have found kind of stand out on resumes that when paired with AI tools, works out really well. A creative person with an editorial eye. And so creative person, they think outside the box. They're able to feel like, how can this job be done 10 times faster with better quality with AI? But then they think on the other side, once it's generated, they have to have this editorial eye to know, is that right? How could I improve that? How could I operationalize that? And so, yeah, this creative person with an editorial eye seems to be like a great characteristic duo when paired with the tool.

And I bet in the interview process, like as you interview somebody for this, it becomes pretty obvious who the right candidate is. Because I think that oftentimes with a specialized role like this, a candidate, the best candidate is going to be the one that you leave an interview being like, damn, I just learned 15 new things from this person. Like, I want to work with them on this team right now.

Bingo. In fact, I left the last final interview with her and she had put, she, you know, so excited about it, pulled up a figma board of a process she had built using an AI tech stack. And at the end I thought like, oh, I want her to send me that. Thus let's just hire so. Yeah, exactly.

I want to go back to something in chat that Jessica mentioned just because I'm genuinely curious about this, like, what Is it about ChatGPT, OpenAI that is bad or whatever. The. Why are you not allowed to use that inside of VMware?

So it's not banned. We don't have any bands. Like, my husband works in finance and his company just, you cannot access it, for example, so he uses his phone to look up Excel formulas because it legit helps him do his job faster.

I love that.

But what we do encourage though is ensuring that you're using ChatGPT for drafts, for maybe ideation, but nothing that is final copy. This is, this goes for any platform though, but certainly not for any proprietary company information. Nobody wants the Samsung breach that happened this year in terms of an employee putting personal or company confidential information into ChatGPT and then it got out into OpenAI and train the model. So that's where security comes in in a platform like Jasper and others that are SOC 2 compliant, that you're using a private instance within just like any usual SaaS Cloud company, and that keeps your data private. You know, we also have in our contract that our data isn't used to train the models, for example. And so this type of stuff is really important. And actually the security of tools that we use legitimately keeps me up at night. So you talk about security is the job of every employee now, you know, not just the ciso. And so this I think is just really important to understand the security of the tools. Just like you wouldn't, shouldn't for everyone who doesn't know this, put your credit card information, for example, into ChatGPT. You know, we don't want company information getting out either.

If you put your credit card information in the chat gbt, you deserve, you deserve that. Like, what would even be the use case? Sorry to take us off topic, but it's my place. I can do what I want.

I'm waiting for Auto GPT, like the execution side of all of this to help make our lives easier. So there is some point at which you say, what does that limit look like? And how, how much can they execute for me?

Austin, is there something that you haven't told me about unsplash?

Maybe that's for a different conversation, but yeah.

No, no, no, it's not.

All right, fine. So like a few years ago I was doing an ad campaign and I couldn't find any good stock photos that kind of matched what I was looking for. So I decided to like make my own and then give them publicly to the Internet to use. And then now my face has been downloaded over a billion times.

You're kidding.

That's really. With a B creators by accident. It's hilarious.

That's unbelievable. I only asked that because only in a room full of marketers would that be like a relevant anecdote. All right, so I obviously like, this is how this always happens. Write up or run a show. All These questions I want to ask all these smart people and then the Q A just kind of runs itself. So I want to flip over there because there's a ton of good questions. And, and if you're listening right now, thank you for all the upvotes. It helps us answer these. So I'm just gonna, I'm gonna just kind of let the questions guide us and feel free to take us wherever we want to go. But right now, this is the most upvoted. This is the most. Excuse me for clearing my throat into the microphone. For all of you later, listening this in on a podcast. Apologies, that was a poor form. Lisa Cox wants to know what is your take on using AI to increase output for SEO content like blog posts and landing pages? Where's the line of using AI to increase efficiency versus creating content that Google may eventually deprioritize?

So I can make this, but I know that you guys also are using it for those use cases. I feel like this is one of the top ones out there. So we work Jasper is like not only using OpenAI, we're actually one of Bard's like biggest partners now and so we're in collaboration with them. Their stance is that generative AI written content, as long as it's assisted, should actually be higher quality content, more informed, better written. And so they reward quality content. They don't reward human or robot written content as long as it's quality and solves the problem that the search inquiry intent, then that's great. I think where search is going is rapidly evolving so we can talk about that. But we've seen so many case studies come up with websites ranking and their content ranking very quickly with quality written content assisted by AI, especially with the surferseo.com, that's our partnership with Surfer inside of Jasper, where you can create high quality SEO optimized content to outrank your competition. Now what I'm seeing is that obviously there has to be a editorial review on all of that. Where you get dinged is if you just keep clicking the generate button over and over like it's a game and that you're going to get crushed for that. So I would definitely not recommend that. But when you start to include first party data with AI written content and then maybe some quotes, third party linking, things like that, you get really stellar content. And what we're finding is the average person on their own without using AI tools spends about eight hours on a blog post, whereas AI assisted written blog posts take about two hours and they're SEO Optimized and all these things that still has to both go to editorial review after that. But now you're looking at 4xing your production time and here you are getting a rank because of the volume and the quality of that content.

Yeah, I agree with everything you just said, Austin. That's what we're thinking too is just put it into one AI tool. And in fact we now have this whole process of various tools, Jasper being one that we put it through. And then of course the final touch is human. We add the quotes, we add the nice interactive tools as we're able things like you're saying just up the page experience. I'd also add that we're really conscious right now of our posting cadence. So even if we can churn out all of these, we don't want to suddenly really change how much and in the rhythm of what we're posting too, too much because you know, just looks potentially it's evolving. But to Google, like clearly we were just, you know, churning this out and the quality potentially isn't as good. So we want to still make it that we are naturally publishing and speaking in a way that we would have not like too, too accelerated in a way.

Jessica, you want to go in? You were about to say something in the beginning of this. I'm curious to hear your perspective.

Yeah, we are still experimenting in use cases across the board, so we haven't dug into it yet so much on our SEO side, I think where the interesting thing is how does it fit into your current tech stack and how are we going to be swivel chairing potentially from all these different platforms? So as Adobe rolls out their generative AI roadmap, for example, and it's built into AEM directly and then you can use those tools with writing website copy from there, for example. Our content creation is heavily sprawled across the organization, so we're definitely still tapping into this specific use case for SEO. What we're seeing more is specifically I can give you examples on like video script writing for example, some more content creation where it's going from two hours just to write an initial outline for a video script to 20 minutes. And there's not only the time savings in the actual production of that itself, but it's getting to the projects quicker. So instead of putting it off because you don't have a two hour time block in your week and delaying the project by a week or so, it allows you to get started faster and that has incredible time savings just to jump into that project plan quicker. So that's a really big one. And like I said, I think with such a large marketing team and use cases coming up that I wanted to share with you guys that you might not think about are people who English isn't their first language but yet speak and write in English every day and hearing use cases where it's literally giving them confidence in the meetings that they're running, in the meeting notes that they're putting together, the follow up emails that they're writing because they can actually run it through a system like this as well as, for example, doing marketing technology research. So something that last year took someone three months to research two different marketing technology platforms. You know, you're pulling all the analyst reports, putting all the data together. They got done in one prompt this year with Jasper. I mean that's incredible. That's something I would have thought about, I do every day. Once you give people access and let them create. I recently heard in terms of coding, this week I'm at Collision Conference in Toronto. What if we just gave our children, for example, the tools to go generate code and see what they create and it's just a different way of thinking about it and that's how we're approaching it from a marketing organization is let's give everyone the access because then they're going to create things that we couldn't have done ourselves or thought of.

That was great. It's clear the depth of thinking that you've had on this topic, that was awesome. To piggyback off of that, there's this question further down in the chat, but I think since we're talking about examples, you've mentioned using AI for many use cases, maybe if each one of you could give one or two favorite or specific use cases that were game changers for you. Kelly, let's go to you first.

Yeah, definitely. So we are using it all of the classic ones like content creation, data manual stuff, but one that I just kind of discovered that I think would be exciting to talk about here is for performance optimization for things like email campaigns. So I recently did a deep dive on a campaign that the second touch of which just wasn't quite performing as well as I expected. And I was able to work with GPT as a marketing strategist almost and just asked its opinion almost on why wouldn't this second touch maybe be performing as well? Is it something as simple as the subject line, do you think? It's the framing and storytelling within the rest of the cadence. And seriously, it gave me an amazing response. It suggested that perhaps the CTA was the problem and I have seen performance improvements. So we are using it for everything and anything under the sun. But that was just a recent use case that I kind of uncovered and thought this is really interesting. I certainly will use this in the future.

I shared a couple already. I'll give you guys another specific one. Other than the general headlines, you know, content creation that I think everyone's talking about. We have a workflow for webcasts, for example, where you can input your webcast title, your audience, audience pain points, value drivers and what we call focal message. And then outputs become the abstract and the promotional materials. So the abstract then turns into the social copy for multiple platforms and then our invite emails with all of our copy promotional copy along with that. And that, if you can imagine that definitely increases velocity in terms of how much, how long it takes products like that.

Austin, what do you got?

So we have like our three biggest channel sources are ads, affiliates and SEO. I can give an example for each. For SEO, we're doing something really cool right now. A campaign doing 30 pages in 30 days using AI inside of sheets with the API over to our CMS, which is Webflow. And so basically you'll create these columns for fields that create the landing pages. Some of these landing pages include categories, so hub and spoke model, the hub being Jasper or domain, the spokes being different topics. For example, use cases is a whole CMS collection. AI for email, AI for SEO, AI for ads. We need a landing page for each one of those. Then you have Personas. Who's buying from you, AI for copywriters, AI for CMOs, AI for, you know, there's different people that will buy your product. And then you have industries, AI for real estate, AI for X, Y and Z. So your product is also in verticals. Now what if you could just ask in Google Sheets AI to write out a headline listening to. And so you'll, in column one, you'll have base information. It'll reference that. Then in column two, you can write the prompt in the formula and reference that first column, the base information to create in column three, the headline. Then column four, the description. And then so you kind of build out a whole landing page in one column. Now if you have all of your industries just drag and drop. And now it automatically generates all of your landing page headlines. Copy feature one, feature two, benefit one, benefit two. All these things. You review that editorial eye, right? And then click the button, send a CMS as draft. Then you have your SEO team go and review it. Now that it's inside of the publisher. That could be WordPress, that could be Webflow, et cetera. Anyway, that was SEO use case our advertising right now. Facebook's algorithm is so good that you don't need to do a whole lot of like micro optimizations. Really what you need to do is feed it a bunch of variations for ad creative. So the job to be done is how do you brainstorm a ton of different ideas off of the same prompt, the same brief, I should say. So you want to spin different angles, marketing angles for that same base brief. It could be a webinar. You want five different angles for that same webinar, five different angles for that new product launch. And you're poking and prodding to find product market fit here. You want to focus one on the pain, one on the benefit, one on the alternative, etc. You can use AI to generate all of those quickly and then let the algorithm figure out which one scores. And so really this is just a scale problem. And so you could have a copywriting team spending all day trying to whip up different brainstorming. Hey everybody at a roundtable, spitball me a couple ideas. Now you got your little buddy here that can, you know, tell you a couple. So those are the two big. The third one is for affiliates. We got about 25,000 affiliates. These are TikTokers and course creators, etc. And now they want to say we have a product that we're launching, like in our new campaigns thing. We're going to get all of them to promote that in their tone of voice. So we use the remixer. And what that is is you upload a brand brief and then it remixes it based on a new prompt. So it could be in their tone of voice. All we asked them was describe who you are and who you serve. So they're like, hey, I'm a tiktoker for mompreneurs or I'm a email automation expert using zapier. And so we talk about that like these are very different audiences, right? But they both are promoting Jasper. Now we use a remixer that bridges our marketing campaign with their audiences and their brand voice. So Times that by 25,000 now everybody has their own swipe copy. This is just like things that are scale problems that are impossible to do by human touch, but when human assisted, like an AI powered marketer. Now here you are like doing things never before available.

That's incredible. One thing to add to that I'd say is like, similarly, I haven't heard that use case with an influencer network. That's awesome. Or affiliate network. We're doing that also internally as a small team. So we are reverse engineering prompts and training it on our voice and tone using Jasper. Give that to someone in the product team just to get it started. Like you were saying, Jessica, it's a release. We need to announce it now. It's in the voice and tone at least, and marketing can go back in much more quickly, editorialize it, but it's just getting over that hump of getting it going in the right framing. So I love that.

Yeah, we're working really hard ourselves on the back end of a couple tools for brand tone and voice. As you can imagine, for a a large company like ours, that's the most important thing. You know, staying on brand versus having a really performant piece of content, for example, was a question asked to me this week. It's more important for us to be on brand and brand trust. So I think it's really important and we think about this a lot as well, just in terms of generative AI outputs and making sure that we can keep that unique brand, human tone part of it, while allowing this tool to help more people write more on brand. So even how do you enable more marketers to create content, but instead of having everything go to brand, which by the way, we don't do today, but making sure that closer to 100% of our content is on brand and even what tools can we use to maybe even scrape our content over time to flag things that may not be on brand or that may need editing? That's what we're thinking about and how we're. What we're trying to get to.

All right, let's talk about goals, measurement. I know a lot of people want to do this, want to make the investment, but how do you measure the ROI of this?

Yeah, I can take a stab at this. So again, keep going back to us being a small team, but the context here is important. So I'd say from a metrics perspective, I'm largely still looking at the same things that I was pre AI in a way, we're still looking at traffic, we're still looking at rankings, still looking at conversions, but I'm way more interested in the shots and the scale that we're willing to go after now and feel like we are empowered and more ambitiously can do so. And I'll give you examples. So right now at tomorrow, we have a lot of exciting things going on, including we just launched two of the world's first. In fact, the world's first two private weather radar satellites. And just in announcing something that big that's a massive campaign for a small team on its own. But rather than just staying at the regular old PR and email campaigns, what you'd expect for promotion with AI behind us, we actually went and created a 30 minute documentary to tell the story to much larger scale. And that's a project that we just wouldn't even, I personally wouldn't have even considered touching with a four person marketing team before AI. So beyond just like the regular KPIs, it's like our willingness and belief in ourselves that we can tackle something that big. That's what I care about more almost now.

I think this is a struggle frankly across a lot of teams right now and our CMO talks about this with us as well. Is that tangible roi? And I think the easy things to go to are time savings. That seems really tangible. I've shared a couple of those already with you guys and those are something that we're trying to keep on a list and then you go back to like okay, what's that time worth? You can put a number behind that. We're also looking at increased velocity over time but to do that you have to know what your foundational velocity is. Right? How long does it take for you to actually get a campaign out the door? If you don't know that you're not going to know the increase. So we are actually spending time looking at what time and effort and cost does that take today so that when we do implement more AI driven activities we can show hopefully that decrease in time and spend and then faster time to market as well as reduction. Like I said overall where you can in agency spend. If there's agencies on. I'm sorry. I think that the role of agencies will change. I think that they will need to become more strategic partners and just as copy generators, copy editors. Frankly I'd rather prompt Jasper, another tool to do that and get it faster and look at it quicker to review and edit which we're already doing anyway. And I think there's going to be a lot of time and agency savings there. So those are the quick hit things that I'm looking at.

I think this also comes with the measurement question to me is like a tale as old as time and fear and marketing. If you invest and do anything you're going to be asked how to measure it. And so I think it's also and what you're listening to each one of these smart marketing leaders here today is it's not one particular metric, but it's being able to stand up in front of the company and articulate, how does this use jobs to be done? We're hiring AI or a person or whatever to do a job. Why are we doing that? Where do we see this fit into our broader marketing strategy? Right. If you just want to compare apples to apples, like, well, how much did this save us in creating ads? Like, that's going to be a different conversation than like, well, hey, we're fundamentally making this bet on AI. We want to invest in it because of X, Y and Z. I think as a marketing leader, you have to be able to own that narrative and then you can dictate how you want to be measured. Otherwise people are just going to look and say, oh well, we're paying this AI marketer whatever salary. Like, she better produce at least X in us. Well, no, there's probably 15 intangible things that she's doing for the company. So I think that's also important part of it. All right, back to the Q and A. This question has the most upvotes right now from David. I'm going to be putting together a boot camp or guide for my marketing team, 12 people about how to leverage generative AI best practices. Are there any good guides like this already out there that I can leverage? Goals to get them all up to speed with how to use it and where they should think about your using it?

Other than attending podcasts like this and following the leaders here, we're really big fans of the Marketing AI Institute. As just a Switzerland and thought leader in this space, they have a free Intro to AI for Marketers class that you can take and we actually partnered with them to get a recording of this for VMware that is available in our learning hub. We're also doing mostly monthly global enablement sessions. So around topics like that, like bringing Paul Raitzer onto our team, we've had Megan and Suhill from Jasper come in and talk to our team. We're doing a demo of different tools including Bard and chatgpt with our team to get inspiration going. But the Marketing AI Institute also has podcasts and lots and lots of resources. We also are funding piloting AI for marketers for our console as well because we just feel that we want that credibility and authority within our team.

Yeah, I would say also marketing at AI Institute can't say enough. We're also going to be at Macon, so shout out plug there. But beyond that, certainly all of the resources you just mentioned, all of the headlines. One thing I Would add that we found quickly is despite all of the great best practices out there, bottom line, it's never going to be this silver bullet, obviously out of the box. You have to work within the walls of your company and your workflows and everything. So just regularly meeting, doing something like a council and really putting it into practice and getting together cross functionally, that's what's been really the most successful for us, is like always customizing it to your needs and goals.

I'm going to tell you something hot. It is hard.

We'll be the judge. We'll be the. Hold on. We'll be the judge. You say it. We'll judge.

If you watch a course that was recorded two months ago, it's already out of date. And this is the hardest part. I have plenty of personal friends that have created courses on this. And even internally at Jasper, we have a boot camp, Jasper AI Bootcamp for our own product. And we're always updating it because it is constantly out of date. And, like, there's new models always showing up, updates to the model and little nuances that are really frustrating get solved the next day. And then now there's a new problem to solve. And we're always leveling up, like everybody is as a community. All AI companies are doing this. The rate of innovation right now is so extreme. And so really the only way to get into it is every day be demoing products, trying things, and even going back to them. For example, I tried an AI voice copier and it sounded horrible, like a robot. And then I just retried it. I was like, oh, it's much better. Like, they've done a good job at improving this. I think last year's like, Dall E and even like other AI art tools were pretty crap, in my opinion. I really didn't enjoy using them despite even, like, our own product. Like, we built it and it's like, really hard. But now, year later, things are becoming really cool. And my favorite one right now is midjourney. And so there's just so much innovation happening every single week and month. So just hop into communities. There's a lot of them out there. They're on LinkedIn, Facebook, Discord, and hop in there, attending the monthly webinars like Dave is doing. These are the best way to stay up to date is because you're getting like, live recording of what's happening. I'm talking about these experiments that we're doing right now. And so you're getting this, like, not old content. So just attend the Live stuff, because that is.

That's a great answer.

I do think though that the foundational elements are really important for AI literacy. I don't think that it's. You're going to jump into something live and be able to understand LLMs and how we got here and why ChatGPT is a thing and how it works at a high level and what you need to know about it. And then I think that's important for security, for use case, for AI literacy, for understanding bias, for, you know, those types of things. I think you have to understand foundationally and then you can add on the what's new, what's happening on top of. But I think without that foundation, and that's what we're trying to do as a survey expert on the same level, it's hard to understand. Or then you are just really experimenting, but you can't answer questions internally if you're, if you're going to ask, is.

That where you'd point people to the, like the AI Marketing Institute? Basically you get, you can get a baseline from them.

Yeah.

Cool. I agree with you both. The reason I also like Austin's answer is like, to this day, a common question that I get in marketing is like, hey, what's the best book on digital marketing? I'm like, there is not one. Because it would have to be updated all the time. And so like, to go back to David's point, I think that if you want to bring something like AI into your company, you have to be like a Jessica or a Kelly or an Austin. And it's like, there is. The bootcamp needs to be like, you. You're the one that's going to bring this in. And so like you want to do a boot camp to your 12 person team. Like, there's not just going to be like, all right, hey, let's listen to this guy talk about AI. And that's what you like, how are you going to do it? So it's like, digest this podcast, do this one thing, do this one thing. Then develop your point of view about how you can bring AI into your company. Company. And you almost have to be the one that's going to lead that. Like, look at what Jessica did at a 30, 000 person company, created a marketing AI council. Like, this is not something that you can just like hire a consultant and say, like, teach us what we should be doing. That might be one data point, but you got to hop in there and do it yourself. And even for me, like, I'm in a position where I Don't have to use these tools all the time, but I'm forcing myself to do it. And so one thing I've done is in my browser, I have Jasper, Chad, GBT and Bard bookmarked. And the only reason I have them bookmarked is as a reminder to myself to go them all the time. And so I got to send out an email tomorrow. Okay, I'm going to go try something and I think you have to take that mindset, especially this early in something. Okay, we have like, we have time for one more question. I'm going to flip this over. Do any of you three see a question in the Q and A that you think we should pick and answer right now? Tell me, tell me.

We're all looking now. I just want to say quickly for the bootcamp thing because I think this is a fun exercise. Once you understand the opportunities of AI, ask your team, if you had a magic wand team, what would we do? What would we want to do? Because the possibilities are likely already out there or on the cusp of being ready. And so getting your team together to say, here's what we would love to do, this would work. It allows you to start going, well, let's see if this is possible or talking to certain partners to create it. Because chances are it won't be long before that exists.

Yeah, so much is change management. It's like thinking, really zooming out things again that I could have never imagined a four person marketing team even like broaching the subject on, just like thinking bigger and realizing that like, maybe it is possible. Yeah, bring it up. Let's talk about it. Perhaps.

I think what's exciting is generative AI kind of captured our attention. But where I see there's two more kind of phases coming in. You have evaluative AI and autonomous AI. And so evaluative would not be necessarily generating new content, but rather it's evaluating existing content, scoring it, or asking it for strategic advice. For example, I recently did this with, I have an Airbnb here in Austin for bachelorette parties. And I was asking it to review all of the conversations. I kind of exported those and copied and pasted it into a chat. I was like, hey, what are common questions coming up? And I'm asking it to evaluate those. What would you recommend as an Airbnb expert? What would you recommend that I do to improve my property for this audience? I did the same thing for my financial statements on that property. I said, give me a cash on cash return based on all my income and expenses over the past quarter. And so it was able to actually do that math figure it out for me. And I didn't have to like whip out my calculator. I did just to check it and it was right. So these are like, you know, evaluating strategic, financial, operational like conversations, figuring out, hey, based on all these reviews. So you export your G2 crowd reviews and you say what's like a couple features that are coming up the most that we should add in. What's missing? What are The do the 1 stars? Do the 5 stars? Find commonalities? This is evaluating existing stuff and doing it in a really quick way. You could use that within Google sheets. I'm right now playing around with gpt4sheets.com or GPT for work I think is the name of it. And they call their their product GPT for Sheets. That seems pretty cool. Then you know, you get into autonomous AI and Jessica was kind of starting to talk about this. This is gets exciting. Here we are with Zapier and all these APIs coming out where we're starting to see our martech tools coming in like chat spot by HubSpot is you're starting to be able to ask it, generate a report on X, Y and Z or change the lead score of this contact when these things happen. Now we're not there yet because I really do think it's pretty hard to scale up and every tech system is different, so it's going to be a while until it can actually do that. But that's where we're going. So I wanted to like we've talked about where the puck is. I want to tell you where it's going because those are some really exciting things.

All right, you all got to get back to your real jobs. Thank you so much for doing this. There's a ton about this is going to be a great podcast episode later. People get a lot of value out of this recording. But I'm so glad to have all the people here live because we got a bunch of Q and A that made this a lot better. So. So thank you. Austin, Kelly, Jessica, do me a favor. If you're watching this, go and follow each one of these awesome people on LinkedIn. Connect with them, send them a message, tell them that you learned something new from them today. Otherwise, thank you for joining us for another Exit 5 live session. I appreciate it. Go and follow these smart AI marketers and if you could take one thing from all of them, learn what they're doing, which is being an early adopter can be a way you can Create an advantage for yourself and your company in your career. I'll see you all later. I'm getting screamed at already. One of my earbuds is wet because it's been chewed on this whole webinar. So good to see you all.

Thanks so much.

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