OpenAI’s marketing head on CMOs' biggest AI mistake, and Sam Altman on in-person experience's future

OpenAI's marketing head shares one big mistake CMOs are making with AI. So it was an interesting article on Fortune, but to paraphrase, they asked the head, hey, do you think AI is going to replace CMOs? And they pretty much responded with this answer. AI is also much more geared towards replacing tasks. Today, it can handle 5-second or 5-minute tasks. We expect it to be able to take on 5-hour or maybe even 5-day tasks on the more distant horizon. That frees up your workforce to be much more creative, focus much more on the strategic challenges, and unlock entirely new ways of marketing.

You know how you and I— so we've been talking about M&A, right? So I wrote an entire memo. It's like an 8 to 10 page memo. I sent it to some of my leadership team. There's— so there's an M&A thesis, right? But there's also one around AI. And what I wrote in the AI memo was that I believe in the next 5 to 10 years, The top 5% of people are always going to have a job. They're very strategic, they're very creative, they're very innovative, right? They're going to have jobs. Now, they're probably going to have AI agents working for them. Like maybe for each client, you might have 5, 10, 15, 20, 100, 1,000 of these agents working and they're doing the work because a lot of the work is repetitive at the end of the day, right? A lot of it can be automated. So the people like a CMO is responsible for driving strategy. Strategy is theory and theory comes from pattern recognition, it comes from experience, it comes from learning a lot of different things. So the CMO job is probably not going to go away because as long as people need to sell things, there's going to need to be marketing.

Totally agree. And I think what's going to end up happening with general marketing jobs, yes, some will be replaced, new ones will also be created because there'll be people who help integrate AI into corporations or for different activities. But what I think that is going to really happen is no matter what role you're in marketing, there's going to be a lot of time that's freed up from boring, mundane tasks, right? Like SEO keyword research, Or on-page SEO, fixing title tags or duplicate pages. There's a lot of things.

Updating content.

Updating content. You may still have to rewrite it manually, but it can tell you, hey, what's out of date and just, you know, tell you, hey, these are your pages that are decreasing in traffic that you haven't updated. So that way, you know, you got to go and do something about it. But what it's doing is it's actually freeing up your time to be more productive on the tasks that can really move the needle that are— that's harder for AI to do. And I really do believe that people are going to get a higher ROI from marketing. The people that are really terrible and aren't adapting, and I see this all the time, like when I go to conferences, there's a lot of people who don't care to adapt. Like, oh, regulation's going to slap it away and it's not going to exist. I'm like, I don't believe that, but all right, if that's your take, go for it, because I don't have a crystal ball. And what I think is going to happen is The people who don't leverage it, they're going to go away. The people who are leveraging AI, they're going to be more valuable. They're going to get paid more. And a company's going to need more of those marketers because they can get a higher output from them, more ROI. So they'll be willing to pay a little bit more for those people.

Do you know the difference between the internet versus AI?

No.

So the internet is a network. AI is a computer. And so a lot of these AI companies are talking about how they need more compute, they need more energy, right? You need more energy to support the compute, right? That's what these things are. They're ultimately, it's more compute and it's more compute than you and I can ever imagine because all we can power with our brain is a light bulb, right? Most people don't know that, right? And so we're going to have a lot more compute available to us, which means we're going to get a lot more things done to your point. And we're going to save a lot more time at the end of the day. And with that time, humans are going to be able to be more productive. You look at the industrial age, we created all these things. People are like, oh my God. And then they got, they reskilled, they found new jobs. I think what's going to happen I don't know if we talked about this. I think we did. But what's going to happen is a chunk of people might lose their jobs and then they're going to realize that leisure wasn't what they were looking for in the first place. And they realize that creativity is what they want, right? Because you and I, we've had the time on the beach or whatever. It gets very boring very quickly. You just want to go back and do something. You want to be productive. All right, everyone, quick message from the Agency Owners Association. So this is the peer group for agency owners that Neil and I both put together. This is for people that are doing 6 figures, 7 figures, 8 figures, even 9 figures as well. And we're all here to help you grow your agency faster in this group. We share leads, we share learnings with each other. It's a community where people can ask questions, their most burning questions personally, professionally. We'll share templates, reports, things like that. We're constantly adding more value to the group. I will tell you that the price is continuing to increase. The good news is that there's no long-term commitment, so you can just learn more by going to marketingschool.io/agency. Once again, that's marketingschool.io/agency to learn more, and we hope to see you inside. Speaking of OpenAI, did you hear So, Sam Altman did this interview and he talked about this one thing that's going to get much stronger in the next 5 to 10 years and AI will not be able to touch it.

What is it?

Community. So, in-person events, those are going to get stronger and stronger in a world where there's virtual girlfriends, there's virtual— like there's a Chinese-speaking Neil Patel, there's a Hindi-speaking Eric Siu, right? But community is not going to go away. So, he's betting that community-based companies are going to become more valuable. And I thought that was an interesting thought.

In-person communities or online communities or both?

More in-person, but both kind of.

I agree with that. I just came back from Brazil literally this morning, as you know, and we're recording this podcast.

I thought you came back last night.

No, I flew back this morning.

Oh, wow. Okay.

So I flew back last night, but I got here this morning, right?

Got it.

So it was a long flight.

Got it, got it, got it.

And even when I go to places like Brazil or India or, you know, like next month, I think I'm only home 3 days for the whole month.

Wow.

And the reason I go is—

You better— guys, this guy better bring his mic because you know what happened? I got— we got so much crap. Someone's like, dude, it's legit really, really bad. He needs to bring a mic. So this is, this is on, on camera, everyone. He's gonna bring a mic.

I'm gonna try to.

No, no, no, no, you better bring a mic. It's the only thing we need.

Does it plug into the iPad?

I, I got you one of those mics before that would just plug in.

Ideally, I want one that doesn't require that big mixer thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll buy a USB one.

No, it's not a USB. It's something else.

You can get it. No, no, it's not the Focusrite.

Okay, how about this? If you send me a link to a mic from Amazon that just plugs into here and I don't need that big red thing, you know what I'm talking about?

Do you have the dongle?

The what?

The dongle, the thing that you plug in so you can plug in multiple things.

I don't plug in multiple things.

No, no, no. So when you plug it in here, it has like a USB plug. It has like another USB-C thing.

I don't need that 'cause the—

You have multiple ones? Yeah, there's one on the side and one part of the keyboard. You have a new one? That's a new one?

Yeah, but yours does too. There's one on the side.

No.

And then check out on the bottom of the keyboard right here.

No.

I promise you there's one on the bottom right there.

No.

Okay, turn it on the other side. Yeah, right there. There's a connection. That's a USB-C. You didn't know that?

I never knew that.

There's 2 on iPads when you have the Magic Keyboard.

Okay. I'll send you a link. Guys, so the reason we're talking about this, here's the marketing lessons. Like, what are they even talking about? With you, even with YouTube videos, with podcasts, the main thing that matters is audio at the end of the day. So Neil, when he moved, he couldn't find his mic, right? And also it was kind of a pain in the butt. And then I sent him links to the new one. Neil didn't buy it yet, but now enough people have complained that Neil will do it.

My new house has an office, so I won't have this problem once I move. So that'll solve the problem. Then we won't have these mic issues.

Well, yeah, I mean, but you won't even be using the office because we'll be recording in person if you're home.

Oh yeah, that's true. We record in person now. In Vegas, I used to use an office. And we recorded virtually, but you were in LA.

Anyway, going back to what you were saying, in-person events.

Yeah, like when I go to India, I go to Brazil, all these places, we get a lot of business done in person. We don't do what old school marketing agencies would fly down, pitch corporations to try to win a contract. We actually do that in some countries, like in Canada, we just closed a university 3-year contract, we had to go in person. For that, and and that worked out well. But for majority of our pitches, they're done virtually. But what we do is we do a lot of in-person meetings and networking, and business is still done in person. Maybe we don't close a deal right then and there, but we get to know people, build relationships, foster the community, and it's not always our own community. So like in Brazil, I leverage two communities. One was called Ligi. It's like their version of YPO, and another one was Venture Hero. They had a No, I speak at them. So then we'll go to their events, speak at them. And dude, I was at one of their events in Brazil, not the latest Ligi event, but the previous one. And there was a poker event.

Ligi's Brazilian.

Ligi's Brazilian. So it's just for Brazil.

Got it.

So there was a poker thing. So after the event, everyone was playing poker. It was fake money. There was no real thing. And Dude, so they shut down the poker tables, like the people. We still kept the chips. We tipped the lady. We're just like, we still want the chips and the cards.

So we kept playing with the chips and the cards.

No, we were still playing, but because they took away the fake money, we're still playing for nothing. No, we were playing with shoes and watches and Rolexes.

So you're playing for real?

Yeah, and no joke, like we had the president of Burger King at the table and like a lot of executives, maybe president of Brazil Burger King, but either way, it was a high-powered person. And there was a lot of executives on the poker table. I would say at least 4 of them were in charge of, you know, multi-billion dollar companies, not a billion, but multi-billion. And we were literally just playing poker and we got to be good friends. And even one of them, when I had to go back to the city, it was, you know, to our credit, he's like, oh, just hop in my helicopter. Took me back. I was like, oh cool, this was chill.

All right, look, if you're looking to hire additional marketers for your team, there's no better place to look than, well, hiring nearshore, hiring offshore. And we found that we've We've hired amazing creative people. We've hired amazing people that can help with execution on the marketing side. Whatever it is that you're looking for exactly, we are helping with that. We have recruiters from our side. All you have to do is go to marketingschool.io/hire. Once again, it's marketingschool.io/hire. Fill out the information in terms of what you need, and then we'll have our recruiters reach out to you to help you with the placement. And it should be great for you at the end of the day because you're going to save a lot of money and you're going to get the help that you need. So you're going to get help from a cost standpoint And also an execution standpoint as well. So again, marketingschool.io/hire and we'll see you inside. So there's a couple of lessons here, right? So in-person will never go away. And the good thing about like a Leegi or YPO or whatever is they do a good job at involving— like if you're one of these peer groups, right, could be you're a marketer, you're an entrepreneur or whatever, they try to involve your spouse, your family as well, right? So they get the kids involved and everything. So there's a YPO event that's happening in 2 weeks that you won't be at, but turns out we're going up to Vancouver, right? And the hotel we're staying at, it's a Rosewood. Guess what? It's owned by YPR.

Oh, I didn't know that.

And so like, there's all these connections, right? So like, my point of saying all this is we've talked about community. We talked about the Agency Accelerator, sorry, Agency Owners Association, which is at $5,200 MRR now. Um, and you know, the, the, the thing for that is like, these groups take time to build. I think if you can latch onto a group, there's a lot of new groups that are starting. Um, and a group like YPO has been around for over 50 years, I believe. And now they do worldwide events. They do a lot of these cool things, right? And so, um, if you want to do cool things, A lot of stuff, to Neil's point, is also driven by relationships too. So that stuff will never go away. Like, as much as we want to hide behind our boxers and just, you know, and just like do our work at home, you can't do deals that way.

No, you can't. Especially if you're trying to go big enterprise deals. It doesn't matter how good you are at marketing. It's done in person. And Eric and I have talked about this a lot. So because some people will tell me and they'll post online, Neil, your traffic's going down, your traffic's going down. You know, you're doing a terrible job at marketing. And I'm like, yeah, the traffic's going down. I was like, one, we stopped ranking for generic keywords like Pinterest, Instagram. What's a big one that everyone used for crypto? The community? They were funded really well during the—

The community?

It was like community. What was that app or social platform that everyone using for, not Telegram, but there was another one.

Bluesky?

No.

Signal?

No, not Signal. It was another one.

Not Telegram?

It's like a social site. I never used it.

Not Telegram?

No, not Telegram. I don't know. Either way, it was a multi-billion dollar company that was well-funded. And I was ranking for that, but irrelevant traffic. On top of that, when we had tons and tons of traffic, it was a lot of SMBs hitting us up, which I love SMBs, but we were rarely getting invited to RFPs or closing multimillion dollar contracts. We shifted our marketing from, hey, let's focus on getting more website traffic and brand awareness to, Let's focus on getting more enterprise leads and referrals. So we shifted the marketing channels. We switched more to like Adweek, Campaign, you know, sites like that. Ad Age is another one that we're working on that a lot of CMOs read. And we've gotten some coverage there. We've also started focusing a lot more on Forrester.

And your coverage is not so much awards, but it's more so you guys are creating content, or is it both?

A combination of getting quoted, awards, And, you know, content creation as well. So like maybe we'll submit, you know, some data to them and then they'll want to either cover it. Like Media Post covers a lot of our reports and that we end up putting out like ebooks and white papers. So we started doing a lot of this. Yes. Does it generate that much traffic? No.

Do you send your tweets with all your stats to all these sites? Because it's easy for them to pick up and quote. Do you do that?

We send it before we actually release the tweets.

Oh, I see. That's good.

So we give it to them ahead of time.

That's good.

So because they would quote that stuff because that stuff Yes.

That's why. I think what's important here is that you're hitting people that are relevant to you, right? Versus like the traffic was irrelevant to your point, but now you're reaching CMOs, you're reaching CEOs, you're reaching decision makers, and it's like where they're actually hanging out. And that's marketing 101. Bingo.

So for example, I'll actually give you the Brazil stats because I just came from Brazil and we went over it. Our traffic in Brazil has literally gone down to 1/3 of what it was during its peak. That's a big drop. But the reason it's gone down to a third is we stopped focusing on it and we still maintain some of the traffic because some of the traffic's relevant and we want that. And for those keywords and those traffic sources, we of course, you know, put time and resources behind. But we shifted some of our marketing efforts towards getting RFPs. So in Brazil, I don't know what the name is, but they have their own version of AdAge and we partnered with them. We do a lot of stuff, awards, quotes, guest posting content, you name it. Right? We even do— we have a partnership with them, so that's been great. We also go to— we throw our own in-person events and invite key decision makers. We speak at conferences, and then we do deals with the conference organizer to do another talk right after where we invite selected attendees and do lunch with them, and I'll give a talk while they're eating lunch.

And then you don't charge them for doing that?

We don't charge them.

So instead of saying, hey, I'm going to charge you, Mr. Conference Person, I need you to help me set up a little personal event afterwards. even more value to your audience. Bingo.

And by doing that, now in Brazil, we get roughly 3 RFPs a month from really large corporations that are worth over $1 billion.

And this goes all the way back to in-person works.

In-person works.

Yeah.

And also shifting what we're doing because it's like a lot of people like, yeah, you just need more traffic and traffic. Traffic's great, but if it doesn't drive ROI, who gives a crap? And it's even like paid ads right now. My team's testing paid ads. I don't know what region it's for. So they ended up sending out a little blurb, you know, on, hey, we closed another deal from paid ads. And I don't know what country this is for, but I don't think it's the United States based on the price points. So I was like, nice. How much have you spent on paid ads? What was the total cost? Total cost was $36K. Total close was $82K. I was like, that's expensive. We need way more for the cost to work out. They said, I agree. This includes all the tests from the beginning. Some of the tests did not work out. So if you exclude those, as it becomes more profitable. And the paid acquisition pipe is full of opportunities still. 2 more contracts sent out, 2 proposals out. The contracts sent out for signing doesn't mean everyone's going to sign. Proposals out, hopefully at least one of them signs. And then 8 discovery calls still that need to be— that need to take place. But it's all about testing and doing what drives ROI, not what builds up your brand or your ego. And when I say brand, I'm not talking about your brand like Nike, but like Oh yeah, more people know me when I walk down the street. Who gives a crap? If that doesn't cause more revenue, it doesn't matter. And you and I discussed this on the phone and you even are changing the strategies and you don't care about that either.

Yeah, we can talk about this. You know what's funny? So, Neil had a conversation with our mutual friend, Mr. Alex Hormozi, and then Neil mentioned something. He's like, oh, Eric's going down the fame route, right? And then you tweeted something this week, by the way, about interview podcasts suck, right? And then you put— there's a little line in there where you're like, If you're doing an interview podcast, it's not going to help you become famous. And I was like, bingo! I'm like, I'm not trying to become famous from it, right? But anyway, that's a side note. But I am— I have changed the format. In fact, Mr. Brad from recordeditpodcast.com is coming over after to reset my camera because it's a little too high right now. And I'm going to shoot more direct to camera. And I'm probably going to spend 20, 30, 40 minutes on well-researched— because we run a lot of experiments. We're doing a lot of stuff. We're operating. We're having a lot of conversations with interesting people, right? Do you need to sneeze or something?

No.

Okay.

So, so it's like we have a lot of interesting things to share.

We're doing it right now. In fact, I enjoy this a lot. I do enjoy the interview podcast, but my God, they take forever to set up logistically. It's a pain in the butt. So I'm like, I'm still going to do 20 to 30%, maybe interview podcasts where we learn from really interesting people like Jason Fried coming up, Bryan Johnson, the longevity, the super— he's going to don't die guy, going to live forever. Yeah. But other than that, I just want to share cool stuff that we're doing.

Your Gary Vaynerchuk podcast was really good. I listened to it.

It's coming out next week. Cool. So you got the preview to it. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. That was good.

But like, those are interesting. Like, I want to talk to people that I don't— the audience is one thing. Ideally, they do have an audience, but ideally they're business operators. That's what makes it a fun conversation.

Even the longevity guy. What was his company? Braintree?

Or was it Braintree? Yeah. Braintree sold. And then I think they just merged it with Venmo or PayPal? I think PayPal bought it. I don't know. But it was a couple hundred million dollar transaction, $300-400 million.

Either way, good exit. Yeah, exit's an exit as long as it's profitable.

But see, that's interesting, like actual entrepreneur and then now he's like marketing himself and then he's building a new business. That's it. So go to marketingschool.io/agency to grow your agency faster. That group is growing really quickly. And by the way, we're increasing the price in increments. And Neil's gonna, after we get 16 more paid signups, Neil's gonna appear for one of the Hangouts that we do, and those Hangouts are really fun. Yeah, and then don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. We have to spend time with each other to record these. We spend resources recording this. Yeah, so don't forget, and we'll catch you tomorrow. Bye. Bye.