E157: What Will Marketers Still Own When AI Runs the Campaigns?

Joaquin Dominguez: welcome to episode of B2B Marketing Futures. Today we are asking a question that feels increasingly urgent for every marketing leader. ⁓ What will still own when AI runs the campaigns? AI is ⁓ already changing campaigns are built, optimized, measured. ⁓ It can teams move faster, generate more variations, analyze performance. automate parts of executions that used to take days or week. that also creates a new challenge. If everyone can produce more content, launch more campaigns and automate more workflows, what actually separates good marketing from nice? That's we'll explore today. We'll talk about where AI is generally useful, where it creates risks. What parts of marketing still depend on human judgment, customer understanding, creativity, trust, and strategic context? But before we get into the discussion, I'd love for our guests to introduce themselves, a bit about your role, and so maybe would you to start? Kari Hanson: Sure. my name is Carrie Hansen. I am the chief marketing officer for Robin. Joaquin Dominguez: Thank you so much, Currie. welcome. ⁓ Kevin, welcome. ⁓ Kevin: Hi everyone. I'm Kevin Sloan. ⁓ on the growth marketing team. My area of focus is affiliate and influencer marketing. Joaquin Dominguez: Awesome. So thank you both. think a good to start is with the big question behind this episode, because AI is already becoming capable of handling more and more campaign execution ⁓ from generation and reporting ⁓ to automation and optimization. But the AI takes on execution, ⁓ the more it becomes to define what marketers are actually responsible for. So what are we responsible for? Is it strategy, taste, customer understanding, knowing what to automate and what not to automate or something else entirely? So let's start there. wants to go ⁓ Kevin: Yeah, I can I'm happy to start. So I would say overall AI has been an amazing tool just in the last year or two, being able to campaigns operationally, create content. ⁓ AI has been super helpful. I've really found that creating a PowerPoint can be done with a couple of prompts. running reports can be automated, kind of tracking stuff, but There's also a lot of need for marketing and kind of that human thought and interaction to still have the strategy, have the understanding and idea around the business is. Typically a human probably knows what product is, who the ideal customers are. You can feed that information into an AI pro ⁓ tool. But at the end of the day, I think there's still a lot of judgment that needs to be done through a human that AI just can't necessarily get to just yet. Kari Hanson: Yeah, I would ⁓ echo that. I think the reality is AI is great at executing, but it doesn't have the context, it doesn't have the experience, it doesn't have the understanding, and it just doesn't have that level of insight that a true marketer And I frankly don't think it ever really will. I think it can sort of give you generalized trends, but it doesn't know, what does this mean and based on what's going on in your industry, et cetera. So it's a great executioner, it's a great at automating, it's great at optimizing, but humans need to be the strategist and the context and the oversight. Joaquin Dominguez: And would you be uncomfortable ⁓ fully handing over AI? is something that you think because you mentioned ⁓ Kerry, like we are still there yet, but is something that you will never fully handing over to to AI? Kari Hanson: yeah, I think the the entire cycle, I'll never do it. just like I would never hand it over to ⁓ an intern or even, a senior marketing level. I will always weigh in. I will always want to see things. ⁓ AI can do really great but this premise that it's gonna come up with the marketing plan, it's gonna come up with all the content, it's gonna go do everything and you're never gonna see anything, ⁓ that just seems really weird. ⁓ to me, and it's not something that like I said, I wouldn't even turn that over to all of my humans. At some point, you need to be part of it, you need to see it, you need to understand, ⁓ is it going the rails or is it not? And let's not forget that even if you do automate, and AI is truly automating, but if you do automate a lot of these campaigns, you see examples with ⁓ the BDR, SDR, customer support, ⁓ you still have to have the human to train the model. And so Somebody is always in there training it, refining it, putting guardrails, answering different questions. I can't of a single use case in Go to Market that would be fully handed over. Kevin: Yeah, I agree. I think AI can do fifty percent of the work, percent of the work kind of maybe helping with the strategy being something you can bounce ideas off but you still want to have that human interaction. I think our brains are really we're constantly changing, we're ⁓ processing and you can kind of be more aligned what's happening in the real world. I think a lot of AI is It's consuming data of what happened in the past. It doesn't know current trends. It doesn't know current feelings. now a pushback ⁓ AI where people don't want this AI slop. They can see when something is done and isn't ⁓ So an AI doesn't know that. It doesn't know that humans want that authentic real thing. Sure. And a marketer can create multiple vari variants of an ad copy or ⁓ get different ideas, but they're not gonna, hey, this ad, this creative is gonna scream AI. it's going to be something that's turn off your actual customers instead of engage them. So ⁓ AI might think, hey, this ad resonates really well, but in fact could be the complete opposite. So I think there's a lot of that human judgment that still needs to happen where you can give it that kind of thought and have that understanding of what a human might want versus what a machine thinks a human wants. Joaquin Dominguez: Yeah, I think that's a really interesting distinction between ⁓ automation and judgment. I want to build on that by talking about execution quality. Because one of the promises of AI is that it helps marketing teams move faster. You can create more versions, you can analyze more data. ⁓ test more ideas at the end of the day and respond very quickly. But there's also a downside because ⁓ is doing it, right? In the past just few companies could afford like having people doing things that I just mentioned. ⁓ And if everyone using AI to produce more, the market can quickly become flooded with generic content and it's already ⁓ I would say, right? With weak personalization, automated outreach that feels less human. I love to hear how AI is changing the quality of marketing execution, in your opinion. Kari Hanson: I think ⁓ for me, it's sort of an obvious answer in that, what teams can move faster, they can test these ideas, they can automate. but the downside is that is, you just said, we're seeing this AI slop. It's sort of, the race to the mediocre. And I think, the challenge is this AI easy button is making it so people who are not good at marketing can do it at scale. And that's really what we're seeing. It's not an AI problem. It's really poorly executed campaigns, really poorly generated content that is being automated and generated at scale when it shouldn't have. And so what we're seeing is, all these people can do all these things, but just like twenty-five years ago before. there was social media and before there was, really mass marketing through emails, the better story, the quality perspective, the fundamentals are standing out. And, frankly, one of the things that we're seeing right now is there is such an onslaught of AI generated email that it's horrible. ⁓ But with my company, we're actually our emails are performing really well. Because when you can send a human edited, a human-reviewed, really compelling email, it stands out more than it ever did before. And so I do think, there's this mass ⁓ automation of the mediocre, which is unfortunate, kind of like robocalls, but at some point, the fundamentals are going to ⁓ let people shine. Kevin: And I would say too, on top of that, I think AI inherently ⁓ to create too much content. It wants you to overdo what probably doesn't need to do. These companies they make their money based off the usage of ⁓ how you're creating variants or how much your ads spend. So it's almost in their best interest for you to create more and more content that isn't performing. So that way maybe eventually you find the right content. But it's also counterintuitive because you probably could spend half the budget or less by having that human judgment and knowing right off the bat, like, hey, this copy doesn't make sense. This imagery doesn't make sense. This isn't reaching a right demo. There's almost you can over saturate it with AI slop and AI that You don't even need to know, you can say off the top of your head, hey, this just isn't a good piece of marketing. So I would say, yeah, the challenges like Carrie said, I think there's a of benefits. I think it can really help you build a foundation, but once you want to actually start creating real content, getting it out there and actually start testing it through marketing campaigns, that's where you should have human oversight that can then say, Hey, this Let's try these variants or this is our hook or this is our target audience. This is kind of our main reach. Like you don't need to have a hundred different variants, maybe ten is a good enough to start. and then the algorithms can kind of start picking and choosing which one's the most successful. ⁓ but yeah, sometimes when you have too much choice, I that's also ⁓ can be prohibitive. Joaquin Dominguez: Yeah, and I think being relevant is more important than than ever, right? And because AI can generate outputs, it doesn't automatically understand the customer, the product, the category or the commercial context behind the campaigns. So I think this feels like one of the biggest shifts for marketers. like moving away from producing assets and towards providing the context that makes the work meaningful and understanding ⁓ customers care about, what the market is doing, what the product actually solves, I think, and what the business ⁓ also needs to achieve. I think Kerry you made a point that strong marketing still depends on the fundamentals, like clean data experience. I would love to know more about those ⁓ those fundamentals. What do you think? But that Kari Hanson: Well, I think, good marketing, it's regardless the medium, if you understand your ICP and you understand what your customers are looking for and you can really convey a strong story and the value, it resonates. And I think that the fundamentals of marketing are have always been for as long as I've been in marketing, which is almost thirty years, it's a very technical, this whole marketing now has to be more technical is ⁓ it's a new thing. We back the I don't want to date myself, but back in The olden days, the website manager was probably just as technical as the engineers because it was not an easy thing. But so you have to understand the technology like ⁓ most other go-to-market teams have to deal with. You have to understand how to write and tell a really good story that's compelling, that give the value, and you have to understand business. You need to know what your customers are trying to solve and explain to them how you can solve it. And regardless of If you're using AI, if you're using the internet, if you're using texting, it doesn't matter. if you have those fundamentals in place, you will stand out, in my opinion. Kevin: I think another thing too is I think as you're standing out, you're reaching different people in different channels. think AI and if you're you're using data, you're using analytics, that's a key part of being successful when you're running marketing campaigns. The problem is with multi-touch attribution ⁓ not having a clear path of how people are finding your product, It can be lost like an AI tool and AI might be looking at the data, might be looking at the performance, say, hey, your bottom of the funnel campaign is getting all the sales. Let's only let's scrap every campaign that isn't bottom of the funnel, which any marketer knows, anyone who can understand that you need to have the full funnel within the marketing. So you need that kind of strategy, you need that kind of thought process around knowing that, hey, if this, I guess ⁓ advertisement would never work or radio advertising would never work, but people still do it all the time because we know it builds up brand, we know it builds awareness, and all gets tied in together. So I think, yeah, to Carrie's point as well, of you need to have this kind of fully functioned kind of thought process around what the strategy is, who our target is, ⁓ they live, how can we reach them. And you're hitting them from multiple angles, and it all becomes this part of this marketing ecosystem. Whereas an AI tool probably can't think about that from an outside perspective looking in. It's only purely looking at the data and the numbers, where you have to kind of say, hey, there's additional value that can be brought from different marketing channels that doesn't necessarily live within the actual hard data. Joaquin Dominguez: Yeah, I agree one hundred percent. And I think that leads naturally into creativity and trust because ⁓ if makes it easier to create content, it also makes it easier for brands to sound the same. ⁓ And lot of marketing teams are now asking how to use AI without losing originality. How do you use it to speed up production ⁓ without flattening the brand, I think ⁓ that's ⁓ a challenge that everyone is facing today. So how do you maintain a real point of view? How do you avoid producing ⁓ content looks the same, right? ⁓ And I love to to hear from you. How should marketers use AI without losing originality, trust or brand quality? Kari Hanson: Well, I think this goes to my my earlier point of there are certain things you don't give to AI. the the biggest risk isn't the bad content, it's as you said, the sameness. And, ⁓ the thing AI, especially when we're talking about generative content, it takes everything that is out there and it comes up with ⁓ new ways to talk about it, but it doesn't present new ideas. So there is no unique perspective. It is sort of a lowest common denominator. And so when you talk about How do you not lose your unique perspective? It's simply you don't give it to the AI. Like this is where, again on my team, I would never let an intern come in and drive our brand voice. they would have a say that we would want to teach them, but you over years you develop as a team your brand voice and you control it. And then people who work on the team ⁓ can take and can execute it. And I would think of AI as one of those team members, but you don't hand it over. And I think this is where that human person can really, drive the trust, the context, and that unique perspective in a way that AI never will. And if you hand it over to AI, then what you're going to have is the same perspective as all of your competitors. Kevin: And then my role's a little bit more granular and a little bit more focused too. So my day to day is working with humans on the other side of my campaign. So when I'm working with influencers, I'm working with content creators, I'm working with affiliate partners, I use AI for a lot of the operational behind the scenes. So I can pull data reports, I can pull that into ⁓ a CRM system, I can do automatic note taking, I can have dashboards built, but And I can have AI kind of help write ⁓ the rough draft for a content brief. So I know this is the new marketing campaign we're launching. Here's some I feed it the talking points. It will kind of spit out and kind of give me some more ideas of maybe how a content creator should be positioning themselves. But at the end of the day, that's kind of where AI stops and I jump in. I'm still scheduling phone calls and video calls with partners. I'm getting to know them on a human interaction. I'm feeding them my Personal insights. I know the brand. I know the product. I know the talking points. I want these partners to be speaking of. So I'm using AI to take a lot of the busy work out of my hands, but then I'm still coming in with my perspective, my experience, my knowledge, my thoughts. So that way there's also less ⁓ how do I say this? There's less confusion or there's no sort of you don't have that back and forth of like, ⁓ What are you looking for? I can tell them, I can paint the picture of, hey, this is the message you we want to do. We want it to be in your voice. So kind of again, like what Carrie's saying, it's the brand perspective. what the you want to be, but we also want it to be authentic from our partners as well. So again, we give them ⁓ on a silver here's what we're looking for, but I'm still providing them that thoughts, the feedback. Having that quick dialogue. And sure, it might take a little bit more time because I have to have a 15, 20 minute phone call with a lot of people, but the campaigns are much more successful. Everything's a lot more authentic. The audience it resonates with a lot more because they can see that it's authentic. It's not AI generated. It's not mass-produced. It's an actual human, having an actual an actual promotion of our product. So again, AI has been super helpful with me. managing, keeping track of who's doing what and where it lives within our CRM. But at the end of the day, you still need that human to go in and make sure that everything's running smoothly and that the right messaging is coming across. Joaquin Dominguez: I love you have mentioned many times, Carrie, the idea of having an intern and how you teach an intern. And I love the analogy of like how you teach an how you teach AI. I don't know if you have experienced this, but at least myself, like the relationship I have with all ⁓ the LMs today, it's totally from one or two years ago, them because of the memory. because of how much they know about me. They know if I ask something, they reply my style with the things I like. And it's the same thing of teaching an intern, in my opinion. I love to hear like when you teach an intern about the brand voice ⁓ or about the ways that run in an office or things like that. What kind of things are the most important ⁓ and how you transmit that tacit knowledge that is out there, like something that you have built for years, maybe a brand voice way of working ⁓ to who's new. And if you can transmit those skills to AI one day to to be like to start maybe from an intern, but to become ⁓ like an that really helps you with with everything. Kari Hanson: Yeah, I think ⁓ really about situational awareness, situational context, and sort of the reasoning of the why. As something that, an AI is not gonna know based on anything that you give to it. So, if you start with an intern, an entry-level marketer, they might come in and say, Well, I wanna use this, and it's like, Hey, that's great. There's probably a reason why we're not doing that. Or maybe there's something we tried it, it didn't work for these three reasons. So if you're gonna try it again, let's come up with something different. Or it might be, let's go this direction. ⁓ I understand why you might think that. But if you're selling to a CIO, here's how it's gonna land. Like it's all of those, along the way you give it that little feedback. And just like you would with an LLM or a GPT. I have my own GPTs, and since they first came out, I've had some. And so they started as an intern. There are a couple that I trust more. There are a couple that, I finally gave up and I was like, it's not gonna work. We're just gonna part ways, you go somewhere else. But it's All of that context even with an LLM, it's, what, I don't want twenty-seven paragraphs of an answer. Give me three bullet points. Like little feedback how to work with me that you would get like all of this along the way that you train. ⁓ And this is I say out of the gate, yeah, I would never give an intern full access to just go run and go do it. I would never give AI that. And over time, certain agents or certain LLMs you might start trust and you give that one a little bit more power, but you're still, even my senior director, I weigh in and I have context. Even as a CMO, I get feedback from other executives. ⁓ Nobody just runs everything a hundred of the time. And I just think it's all of those conversations that you need to continue to have. Joaquin Dominguez: Yeah, it's like building a relationship it takes time, right? And you don't go from zero to one in one week. Probably takes like a year at least to train someone to get to one. But are there ⁓ any frameworks or ways of sharing that knowledge in that you have seen. Also you came in with when you work with partners, like and and if you feel that you will ever Transmit those skills to AI to a level that you feel comfortable, like you teach an intern or some or a partner. Kevin: think it's interesting kind of for some other context. I think in a professional sense, we've been doing this for so long. Like I feel like we know what we're doing, we know what we're talking about. It's hard to fully trust an AI platform of something that you know ⁓ well. You could say, hey, this doesn't make sense, or that kind of sounds good, but realistically that's not gonna work. But where I've seen AI where I on it more than I probably should is an area where I don't have the expertise. And I know this is maybe a little bit more off topic, but I'm not a technical person. But if I use AI to generate a SQL query or run HTML or build me a web app or whatever it is. I don't understand that at all and I rely on it a lot more because I assume it knows what it's talking about and I can kind of bounce ideas off it a little bit more and say, hey, can you clarify this, explain it like I'm a five year old, like me more ideas. So I think in context too of where we trust AI, what we're gonna hand it off and how we see it long term, I think it depends on an individual's experience and expertise in an area where, yeah, if I know marketing and content creation really well, sure, AI can be a helpful tool, but it's never going to be my full versus if I don't know web programming and development or something and it's I'm gonna trust a lot more and hope that it's right and use it a little bit more to make those final decisions because it knows more than I do. So I'd say in terms of in general, I think it yeah it depends on a person's level of expertise within a certain field that is how much they're gonna rely or trust on AI to do something for them. Kari Hanson: I think it's sort of important to just qualify that I I'm not looking at AI to replace ⁓ I don't know why I don't think like that. ten years ago my marketing team was probably, four times the size as it is now because we've gotten more efficient. Like when I look at places that I want to bring in AI, that there are certain use cases where I'm like, hey, we can automate that and we can point it. But me, I'm not looking for can I just bring in and only run an AI because it's just not the way that marketing works. And also, then start having questions and we're seeing this play out. Well, what if I build this whole marketing team and it's all on AI and then one of the AIs changes this consumption pricing and suddenly it's five times more expensive than my like to me it's so new that, there's certain people who want us to focus on that ⁓ for, their IPOs, but I don't I don't see the reason. I think If you look at AI as a tool, there are places that you can fully automate it. There are places it can help you optimize and move faster. There are places where it can help, sort of ⁓ lower functioning people elevate their skills quite a bit. Like there's a lot of places to use it to just take my current team and, as they say, 10 exit. But the idea of like where would you just sort of drop it in and go, I people aren't thinking that way. And I think it's so new. It's The ones who did think that way are now sort of scrambling because they're like, wait a minute, I got rid of my whole SDR team and I dropped these in and now it's five times more. And now you see, both of the big AI companies are hiring hundreds of BDRs. So, to me it just doesn't make sense. And I don't understand why people think that way. Like if you're focused on how do I use the tool, you're gonna end up in the wrong place. If you're focused on how I leverage today's tools to make my team Go farther, faster, or do better, that's where you're gonna see the real results. And I think the people who are succeeding in AI are on that side of the house. Kevin: ⁓ I appreciate an executive such as Carrie who's coming and saying, Hey, here's a tool, here's a resource to make your job easier. We're not going to replace you. I think that's the biggest challenge that any IC level person has is needing the tools, needing the resources. We're always asking for more headcount. We're always asking for more budget to run more campaigns to optimize stuff. So I think AI has been a great tool to unlock those additional resources, but there's a clear difference between unlocking tools, allowing the individuals on a team to be more efficient versus trying to replace them completely. So yeah, trying to have five one do the work of five marketers ⁓ and your paid search team because AI can generate keywords and run reports and just kind of snowball and cycle that through, probably gonna be a challenge because you need that oversight. But in order to more content, do it at a large scale, but still have that human oversight, I think is definitely a winning strategy for sure. I would say I think as someone again, an individual contributor going up to leadership, I'd say there's kind of the two sides of it. You want to be operationally as as possible so you can do as much ⁓ or with your small groups. I'd say being able to automate reports when you're present presenting up to executives or your managers and leaders, a lot of times they don't care about the day-to-day execution. They want to see performance. They want to see results. So if you can take a lot of that work, if you can automate it, if you can make it as concise as possible, that's where you're gonna win because that way it makes your manager's job easier. They can set the strategy, they can understand what's working, what's not working, while you then on the back end are able to then ⁓ Do kind of the strategy, create the campaigns, make it as efficient as possible and create the best results. So there's the two sides of the coin of making your day to day as efficient as possible so you can create the best quality of work and then being able to present that in a way that the upper level leadership is going to be able to digest and consume and show that you're doing a good job at what you're doing. Kari Hanson: I think those are great and I would add on my side, I've always maintained, ⁓ and AI has not changed this, that every marketer needs to be a great writer. I don't care what your role is, you have to be able to write and tell a story, ⁓ depending on the audience, and technical, non-technical. I think every marketer should understand the business. You should know how to read a P<unk>L statement. You should know the challenges your customers are working on. ⁓ I think with AI, I would add the third that you have to be a critical thinker. You have to know when to question it. because it can be very compelling. ⁓ and Kevin talked about he uses it ⁓ when on things that he might not have the skills behind or he might not understand. And it can be very compelling. It could tell him a really good story ⁓ or a really opinion on this is the way to do it. And you have to know when to question it, when to go validate it, and when to trust it. And I think that's the piece that people are trying to figure out. Joaquin Dominguez: Thank so much, Kevin and Kerry, for joining us today. And for all the ones listening, thank you so much for joining B2B Marketing Futures. ⁓ Until next time. Thank you so much.