AI Won't Save Your Marketing. This Will.

Does your experience with AI sound a little something like this? You've been prompting for 20 minutes. The output is polished, confident, and completely useless. That's what happens when AI doesn't know anything about your business.

HubSpot's AI works with your actual customer data, every interaction and every signal your team has generated over time. So instead of prompting and hoping, you ask once and ship it. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. So Neil and I, we do this podcast called Marketing School, and we've been doing it for, what, 10 years now?

Yeah, it's been a long time. 10 years, yeah. We first started doing it in his Vegas hotel, and he had to turn off the air conditioner because it was too loud, and it was like 115 degrees. So anyway, it's been 10 years, and I think today we're going to do some classics and some trends.

for this next 30 minutes before Glenn goes on. So yeah, I think maybe I'll lead off and we can talk about some cool stuff we're doing too. We'll just treat it as a conversation. We'll try to milk as many clips as possible.

Maybe that's a trend we should talk about as well. And maybe just I'll lead off with this piece. There's... How many of you have heard of that podcast, TBPN, the tech podcast that was acquired by OpenAI for $200 million?

Okay, so two people, three people. Okay, so they have a really interesting strategy. They, I think... This year, they were on track to do about $30 million as a podcast with like 10 people.

The year before, it was $5 million, and they're driving a lot of distribution. Neil and I were talking about this concept known as the clipping economy, where they might get 4,000 or 5,000 live views, which is cool. It's pretty good. But a lot of the clips that they publish to X, for example, get hundreds of thousands of views, right?

And I think you can apply this to e-commerce as well. But the strategy that they have is they will interview clients like Mark Cuban or Travis Kalanick from Uber. They'll interview all these tech giants, right?

For like five, 10 minute segments and they'll milk it for a ton of clips. And earlier I was talking to two guys that they should start like an e-commerce podcast where they just bring on cool guests in the e-commerce space and just take out these clips, right? Because what's happening now is when you're not really just doing a podcast, you're actually trying to get as many clips as possible. And we were talking about this last week where

I started, we started taking these two, three minute segments from this podcast, publishing into X and, you know, don't get a good amount of views. Right. And these actually drive pipeline, at least for us. And we publish it to LinkedIn as well.

So I think even though this is in the B2B concept or, or like a, like a tech concept, I think you can apply it to what you're doing. So oftentimes you can just adjacent a little bit and you can pull this over. And, uh, I think a lot more people are going to try to do this. And so might as well.

Yeah. Um, Your guys' space is all competitive. What I found is the boring and ugly still work well. And I'm a big believer that AI is the future. And there's so many different things that you can end up doing.

But what we're noticing in e-commerce specifically is everyone's focusing on this new thing, AI. And I'm not saying you shouldn't, but they're forgetting about the fundamentals that are driving business results.

So for example, with e-com businesses, we see influencer marketing work well. In which, not if you go through a platform, I'm talking about you have someone internally, not an agency, reaching out to thousands and thousands of people and recruiting influencers.

And then running ad campaigns with the creative that those influencers created. Works extremely well. You can negotiate great rates. Keep rotating them up.

This kind of stuff is boring and ugly. It's worked for many years. And right now, whenever I go to e-com events, and I was just at one of the biggest e-com companies in Europe, they're actually global. They're in almost every major country that people fly in when I was in Spain.

And they were talking about all the cool stuff that they were doing with Claude, which was great. But then when we started talking about the fundamentals,

People weren't focusing them on as much. And the reason I was there, I'm not going to mention the brand name, is that you're starting to see revenue slip. When you're a publicly traded company, you don't want to see your revenue slip. It starts hurting your stock price.

You can't forget about the fundamentals. And I would actually say that is the biggest mistake I'm seeing right now in today's world. I don't think we have an issue of people leveraging AI. I think we have an issue of

people leveraging AI in ways that don't actually produce revenue or real results, and they're forgetting about the stuff that produce results. Instead, if you know things like influencer marketing work out, why aren't you using AI to do that 10 times more, right? And automate even the negotiations and biddings and all that kind of stuff.

But instead, people want to talk about using AI in really cool and sexy ways instead of using it to make the fundamentals of your business that are already proven and working scaled up.

That's how I would start thinking about your guys' businesses and marketing. So there's two things there. One, let's talk about what AI won't replace. But before that, I think it's worthy talking about, for example, we did this last week where

Our mandate when it comes to AI for both of our companies is if someone's using AI to build things, it has to tie into helping our customers or helping us get more customers.

And to Neil's point, looking at workflows that are already working, human-led workflows, and then figuring out how to automate there, right? Because the challenge is if you start showing all this cool stuff, you get people, I can definitely pump people off, right? Problem is you start building a bunch of weird Frankenstein stuff that adds no value, right? And then it becomes that AI theater thing and everyone ends up pissed off, right?

It's like, why are you pissed off at me? You told me to do AI. Well, no, I told you to build something useful, right? You might as well just start very clear with your communication.

Yes. And what we found is if you're going to leverage AI internally, we found two things that help really well. Because as your organization scales, you'll run into different problems. We have a mid-sized company, so we have more than a thousand people.

And What we found was a lot of people build whatever they want with AI and you have a lot of overlap, a lot of inefficiencies because people are redoing things that they don't need to do. So the first change we made is you put someone in place to oversee everything that's AI related. And we found is when they start organizing everything and people know who to head up in their company, we start seeing less people working on the same thing.

Because you don't want five people trying to do the same exact thing and solve it five different ways. You're wasting time and money. The second thing that we found is if you don't create a beautiful interface, you may have the person who built it use it. But other people in the organization don't adapt it as well.

So it's worth taking the extra time to beautify whatever you've built. And when we've done those two things, we've seen adoption increase drastically internally and start producing better results for us and our customers.

Cool. Let's talk about what AI won't replace. So I think a very easy place to start is distribution because now you can build anything in the world, but what you can't take away is brand. You can't take that away.

You can't really take distribution away. And so if you learn to master that and compound that right now, I'm sure you're going to have a lot of amazing people talking about live shopping or clipping and things like that.

You want to make sure you can drive as much distribution as possible. And ideally, you just spoke about email, I think, earlier, right? You need to keep building your email list. Because earlier this week, as an example, I spoke to the email marketer I was talking about.

He does about $60 million a year, and he's pretty public with this. And he just has an email list, right? And he's cleaning it all the time. But one really cool thing he has, on his email list, he has a concept known as the make money button.

And it's worked out really well. It drives leads. Did I tell you about the make money button? No? Okay. So the make money, this guy's name is Matt Paulson.

He runs a newsletter called MarketBeat, the stock newsletter. So the way it works is if I'm on your email list, Neil, and I click on three emails within seven days, I'm automatically thrown onto the make money button list. And that is just all of your offers.

one offer first, three days later, another offer, but in taste, right? You're maybe telling a story around it, but it's literally like four or five of your offers. Then, you know, we have a lot of conversions off of that, but then you get kicked off of that, okay? Then maybe five weeks later, I do it again, okay?

I click on three emails in seven days. Guess what? I'm back on the make money mutton again. And he said that has made him millions and millions of dollars over the years.

And so think about how you can apply that tastefully, obviously, to what you do. And yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah, another thing AI won't replace is strategy.

I know people say it's really smart and it's going to be smarter than humans. And I'm not doubting that. But if everyone goes to AI and ask them, how do I grow my e-commerce company?

you're gonna start seeing strategies that just get very crowded and don't work well. What makes marketing super effective is people will randomly try unique things that others have not and it separates them and they do well.

Example of this is when, you know, Nano Banana came out. I believe there was a company, it was a teeth whitening company that created AI to create a gorilla ad about teeth whitening. Was it teeth whitening? You know what I'm talking about.

The dentist. Yeah, the dentist. And it worked really well, went viral, people loved it. But if everyone did the same type of ad, it's not going to be as effective.

It's just like why all good marketing channels, whether it's SEO or paid or social media, eventually gets crowded. And to really separate yourself, you got to have a different strategy. It doesn't mean you don't use those channels. You just got to figure out a way to stand out.

And if everyone's using AI to figure this out, I'm telling you, it's not going to be that effective. And it is off in so many ways. How many of you guys have used chat GPT or Gemini and found that it's given you the wrong information? Raise your hand.

Be honest. Look at that. A lot of the room's raising their hand. The reason being is the way AI works is it scrapes the whole web and it uses that to figure out what to output.

And a lot of the stuff that's on the web is junk. And it's hard to get rid of the junk. Google's been trying to solve this for ages. They can't. I'll give you a polarizing example of this.

On junk, if someone asks about the COVID vaccine, and I'm not trying to get political, I'm not saying it's right or wrong to take it. When COVID first came out, you would have a lot of information of people saying you need the vaccine, right? Right?

Now, I'm not going to ask you to raise your hand. I bet you majority of the room does not take the vaccine anymore. Okay? And I bet you most people don't even have tests in their house or ever take COVID tests when they're sick anymore.

What I'm getting at is there's articles on the web that say the vaccine's bad for you. There's articles on the web that say it's good for you. Both those articles have a lot of social shares. Both of them have a lot of links.

Both of them have a lot of comments. How does a platform decide which one is right or which one is wrong? And because of that, it's hard for AI to always give you the right answer because not everything in this world is black or white.

So let me, I'll give my next answer by telling a story first. So we just hired this kid. He's a kid, 18 years old. He hasn't even graduated high school yet.

Genius, okay? Two of his parents are both software engineers, all right? So my CTO, who didn't go to college, right, he was challenging this kid. He's like, because he's going to college.

He's like, why are you going to college? Give us a good reason as to why you're going to college. And he's like, well, I think AI is inevitable. But I'm going to college.

He's going to a really good engineering school, right? He's like, I know that I have no relationships right now. I have no connections anymore. And the only way I'm going to do it is actually going to college.

And so I'm taking BS classes right now so I can just chill. But I want to hang out. I want to have fun. But I want to build my network because that is going to be worth so much more.

And AI can never replace that. So community will never, this, right? Community right here will never be replaced. This builds trust. This is a form of distribution as well.

And as much of a pain in the butt as events are to do, Stuart, and I'm aware of, events are really hard, okay? It's worth it. it's so worth it, right? Like you do events, I do events, Stuart does events, you're all here, right?

This is community. Yeah, yeah, this network, the community, you know, I highly recommend that when you meet people, you ask them one simple question. What's working for you to grow your e-commerce brand?

If you ask and you share the same, so when people ask you, share, like really share, don't give them a fuzzy answer, really share. you'll leave this event with ideas that'll work that'll help you grow faster.

It's hard to get that stuff from the internet. It actually is much easier in person because people are more willing to open up and tell you the truth. And it's actually from these events, by the way, where I've met some of my closest friends. And so you don't feel shy to just insert yourself into a conversation because everyone's just looking to build relationships.

And then you ask that question. You do that a couple times, a few turns, this is paid for itself many times over, even though it's free. So now it's infinite ROI, right?

So the next thing we can talk about here is, and we Did you see how the... You don't read that so much. Let me explain for you. So right now, there's this concept of the four deployed engineer that's exploding right now.

So the whole idea behind this is that this company Palantir, right? They have this software called Foundry, and they insert these four deployed engineers. These are basically... engineers that help implement their technology, okay?

But that's become a very widely known thing now. Everyone's talking about how you need four deployed employees, not even just engineers. And a piece that I don't think is going away is that the human touch, customer success.

The way they're approaching four deployed employees now is just customer success, right? But it's just like they've remarketed the word. Instead of calling it digital marketing, internet marketing, what do they call it now?

What do they call it now? Gross marketing, right? So it's rebranded, but it's, I don't think that's going away anytime soon. And what's happening now is like, I threw up a random post.

I think it was opening eyes like, oh, they're getting into consulting, right? Because the human touch again, right? Anthropology is getting into consulting, right? And so I don't think that's going to go away.

And I think what's going to happen is those of you in e-commerce, you're going to have to have that. When you think about software, services are converging with software. I think the same thing is going to happen with e-com as well, where people are going to want that human touch more.

And I'll just give you an example. That OpenAI tweet, I just said something on top of it, 100,000 views, 200,000. So I think there's a big demand for it right now. One, some more customer success.

Two, it's just going to trend upwards. You're going to need more of it. Yeah, and we're seeing right now with customer success, A lot of people are trying to replace customer success or humans with AI, and that's definitely doable.

Dude, you see the job post? It's going parabolic now for customer success people. Do you see that? They're looking for more customer success. The job post now, it's like shooting straight up.

People are looking for a lot of customer success people. And what we're seeing is when you think about customer success, we still see humans wanting to interact with humans.

And when they don't interact with humans, sometimes they get frustrated. I was just at a home service conference in San Antonio, I think a few days ago.

And at this home service event, it was for a specific company in which they do fire damage repair, water damage repair, mold repair. So imagine your home getting flooded because of a crack pipe, etc.

Not everyone wants to deal with AI, like when your pipes are bursting and water's flooding everywhere. So they did something that was interesting. They use a product called High Level.

That has AI and they simulated sales calls with high levels AI to actually train humans on how to sell. Right? So then that way the humans do better when someone actually calls and picks up because we all get leads. If you don't do well, you know, you tend to lose out on a lot of revenue and humans get irritated.

And this is happening more and more because I was on the phone the other day with Bank of America for a credit card. My credit card, I was at the gas pump. Someone stole my Amex, like numbers, so they disabled it, which sucks. So I had to use my Visa card and only have one Visa card and one Amex card.

I'm going to the pump and it doesn't go through. And I'm like, why the heck does my credit card not work? What's wrong? I pay my bills on time and stuff.

My credit card, what I figured out was two months expired. I barely used my Visa card. I never got a credit card mailed to me, or at least I didn't see it. Called Bank of America.

They kept giving me AI to answer my support. I was pissed off. And I'm like, I just need a card replacement. I'm like, representative, representative, support, human, operator.

And I'm pushing buttons. And after, I think it was like 13 minutes, I eventually got a hold of a human. And I'm like, hey, I just need a new card. I don't want to talk to AI.

My card's expired. I never got the new card in the mail. She's like, I need to do a security check. I got you. Don't worry. Within a minute and a half, I was done with the call.

She said the card would arrive within two days. It was great. I had a terrible experience with AI. I had an amazing experience with the humans. And I'm not saying you shouldn't have AI answer some of the simple questions, but there's a time and place for AI for your customer support, especially when you have a lot of products and you're doing a lot of volume.

But if you have a high-end product and you're selling something for expensive, people do expect a human for interaction. Yeah, I got a good hook for you on this one.

Social commerce is not a campaign. It now changes the org chart. So when you think about it now, you look at creators, right? A lot of people are, because creators are actually making the ad creatives, right?

You need entire departments for that. And so we can talk about this a little more, but I think this, by the way, this is AI generated too. I do think this is a trend that we're seeing a lot more of, right? What I see on X, like we actually want, what's the trend?

Social commerce is what? It's more so social commerce is not just a campaign. It's more so that it is changing the org chart. So, for example, a lot of e-com people that I see on Twitter, and we see this with our e-com friends as well, they're hiring armies of creators.

And you need a creator manager. You need an influencer manager as well. You need an army of these people. And it's not just, you know, we're not talking like 100 or 200, 300.

We're talking about like 500, 1,000 plus of these people, right? And then you look at that, the influencer... To clarify, he's meaning a thousand creators, not individuals or managers. Yeah, exactly.

But you look at that guy, Clavicular, the influencer, he's only 20 years old. Look how many views he's getting, right? And I think a lot more people are kind of warming up to the fact that, oh, crap, we need to be really, really, really, really, really good at clipping and then apply that to paid media. I think a lot of people are doing it right now.

I don't think they're doing it at that volume. And I think we're going to see a lot more of that. Yeah, a lot of people don't do that as much in e-commerce, but it works well. And the easiest way to start with clipping is you recruit hundreds of affiliates, you give them ideas of what works and what doesn't, and let them go run wild with your brand guidelines.

That's very important, with your brand guidelines. If you don't give them brand guidelines, they'll start doing things that you may not like, that don't represent your products that you're selling or the company.

And then they'll start creating a ton of clips. They'll also create long form videos. And that'll give you, based on which influencers are driving the most volume, you then take that data, you then send it to the other influencers and you say, this is what's working. We highly recommend that you test some of these things out.

And then you just scale it out. And then use some of that stuff and turn it into ads as well. You know what's not going to change and what we're going to see a lot more of? Earlier we talked about distribution.

But I remember earlier yesterday, actually, I was talking to Alex Lieberman, the founder of Morning Brew. And so he's got like an AI transformation company now. But what we're talking about and...

it's just the idea of founder-led content, right? Because who's going to care the most? And so even if you're saying, okay, I work at a company right now that's not relevant to me, I think you can create that because that distribution can't be taken away from you and you might as well start compounding that right now. And so for him, he's like, similar to you.

He has no direct reports right now. He's not in the day-to-day on the business. You're kind of in the day-to-day but no direct reports, right? And he's like, the highest leverage thing I can do is posts and the second highest leverage thing I can do is reach out to people for deals, right?

So Your mileage may vary, but I think it's really important, like whatever you're working on every day, is this the highest leverage thing I can do? In fact, I go to my AI all the time now. I'm like, is this high leverage?

One through 100, how high leverage is this, right? And so that's a super high leverage thing. You don't even need to see founder lead. It's just like everybody needs to be a creator now, I think, in this world.

Yeah, and another thing that's really high leverage for all of you, how many of you guys only sell your product in the United States? Raise your hand.

Okay, how many of you guys sell your product in more than one country? Raise your hand. Okay, good chunk. How many of you sell your product in more than English?

Raise your hand. Wow. Okay. How many of you guys sell in more than 10 countries? Raise your hand. 20 countries? A few, so it starts really dropping. You should be using AI to expand faster globally.

We've been doing this for our business. We're in 28 countries. We actually have boots on the ground in 28 plus countries right now. I was just talking to one of the guys that works at Legion Athletics.

They sell protein powder and supplements. And we were talking about their use of AI to expand into multiple countries faster than for everything, Amazon, for social media, the list goes on and on, because you can dub the videos and the social content in every single language using a lot of these tools, whether it's, you know, 11 Labs or HeyGen or whatever you want to end up using.

And they're starting to see new countries being like, oh yeah, we just expanded to this new country with AI and we're seeing the results like six months later. They already do extremely well in the US, but some of these regions are adding like a half a million dollars in new revenue in a very short period of time. Now imagine doing this in all major countries.

It's a really quick way to drive revenue. And what we typically see in the e-commerce world is, yes, a lot of these countries don't have the spending power as the United States, but it's not as competitive in a lot of these countries. So you can just clean up.

And I highly recommend that you guys go and expand into more countries in the next 30 days. The way you would start is you look at your data and analytics and you see which countries are you getting traffic from and which ones are you getting purchases from outside of the United States or outside of the markets you're in. And then you can order rank them and then you can look at which ones would be the easiest for you to penetrate based on supply chains, laws and rules and regulation.

And the reason I say that is like for Legion, when they sell supplements, there are actually rules for supplements if you're selling them in Australia versus the United States and you may have to comply. For some products, you may not have to. But those are important things to keep in mind. Speaking of cleanup, we're going to clean ourselves off the stage because I'm sure you guys are, you've had enough of us.

So thank you so much for your time. Appreciate it. And I'll catch you later.