Wing It Unhinged - All About Intelligent Marketing - Wing It Episode 102

Speaker A: Maybe even a question period at the very end.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Well, we've run some ask me any things right for customers, so I don't see why we couldn't try that too. Uh, but today we're looking at intelligent marketing. All right. Winged podcast goose digital.com Episode 102, 103. 102, 103. We'll take it. Who do we have?

Speaker A: Kevin Butler?

Speaker B: Michael Turksani.

Speaker A: It's been a while, but we're back.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's been a while. We're back. Um, sorry to our audience for our lapse of uh, content. The social media team has been reusing the old clips.

Speaker A: We've exhausted all of the clips and then some and now we're m empty. We need to refill it.

Speaker B: Yeah, we need to refill. But to be fair, we have had webinars and fireside chats and a bunch of other stuff to fill up the pipe. So. Yeah, so, uh, but yeah, we're back on, on the. On the podcast groove and we're going to even look at a slight. We were talking about doing a slightly different format, not for today, but maybe off into the future where we're covering some of the latest news and uh, and riffing on that.

Speaker A: We thought news could be a few different things, whether it's evolutions of new tools and approaches. I mean AI would certainly be the forefront of that, but um, also it could be about evolutions of various tooling that we use, whether it's well, what's going on with meta and paid meta, what's going on with LinkedIn and various changes there, but also into the actual tools. Whether it's additional changes with Paradoc going into marketing cloud of Salesforce or whether it's what's going on with HubSpot as they look to OpenAI to integrate more capabilities and functionalities. So I think we could kind of split it down a few different perspectives, including also strategy and new go to market approaches.

Speaker B: Yeah, totally. And it would be nice to get a little bit, you know, some of the podcasts I listen to, they've got uh, a little bit of a standard format to them. They've even got the odd transition between those sections. So I'd like to like to see if we could mix it up a little bit with that kind of stuff,

Speaker A: professionalize the podcast, maybe even a question period at the very end.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Well, we've run some Ask me any things right for customers, so I don't see why we couldn't try that too. Uh, but today we're looking at intelligent marketing.

Speaker A: So we've been slowly, uh, filtering that out with. We've had a few press releases about other things. We've kind of started intertwined this concept of intelligent marketing and what it means. And it's certainly going to be a really big part of the second half of 2025 and into 2026 for Goose Digital and how we're rethinking not only our delivery model but even how we want to market as a business.

Speaker B: Right. Yeah. I mean it's our 10 year anniversary this year. Official 10 years. So we're still need to party. Yep. What's that?

Speaker A: We still need a party.

Speaker B: Yeah, we still need to party. Um, and we're doing a website. We are. So I can't remember what number of site this is. Maybe 4, 4th and 10. Original.

Speaker A: I think 4th.

Speaker B: 4th and 10. Yeah. And uh, you know, so we're constantly thinking about the website and how it represented and it's like whenever you launch a site it's like never really represents what you are at that time because it takes some time to launch it. But we're trying to get closer and this has been, I think about four years. Yeah, it's four years since we've relaunched and I, you know, I think our site looks pretty good. Shout out to Jay, um, who did our site. Um, but we're ready to sort of continue to kind of realign and I think with the big push, couple things. One, I think our kind of broader skill set that we've evolved over the last four years, um, in terms of services and capabilities. Yeah, in terms of services and capabilities and platforms that we support, number one. And then with this boom of AI and what, you know, what that's been doing to the marketing industry and in particular, um, how we've started to use it, we figured, okay, well this is a good time to kind of like relaunch the entire quote unquote brand, if you will. We're not changing the logo. Um, and yeah, so that's where we've come up with a theme, if you will. I guess it's a theme of philosophy. What would you call the intelligent marketing? An approach.

Speaker A: Yeah. Like a direction or an imperative, if you will. Like just some sort of guide to say where are we going and what are we. What does the mission now represent? Like.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Really like the outcome is still going to be driving immense marketing value for our clients across digital and strategic planning. Mhm. But I think there's new mediums, there's new ways to Deliver these things and ways that we can think about how marketing can do that. So for sure, I think it's kind of all of the above of what you just said.

Speaker B: Uh, I feel like intelligent then pick your word. It's like, has it been overdone? I mean, I don't know. Like people use it for various, uh, for various, like taglines or, you know, mantras. So I think it deserves a bit of explanation. I think on the, on the news website we're going to have a kind of area dedicated to, you know, what do we believe that it is?

Speaker A: Well, right. I think this is the new juncture of marketing. So like intelligent marketing. What was previous marketing? Dumb marketing. It's like dumb phone, smartphone thing. And I think what it's a acknowledgement of really, it's just about a heightened sense of capabilities and what we're going to do. Old phones are great. They connected people and they did what they were supposed to. But now all of a sudden, phones have really evolved into being a much bigger thing.

Speaker B: The fact that we still call them phones is crazy.

Speaker A: Well, right. So I think with marketing, I think we're at, uh, we're at a new place now where we can start to engage, intertwine with different ways to do things and it's exciting. Like, my biggest fear is I'm not learning some of these things fast enough. M. Like it's a little bit anxiety driven. I think most marketers would agree. Like you go onto your LinkedIn feed for five minutes and you see the kinds of things people are doing with AI and you're like, am I falling behind? I was literally like on track yesterday. So what's going on? So I think what we're trying to do with intelligent marketing is it's not necessarily jumping all over buzz terms, but it's like, how can we apply some of these either new frameworks, new ways to do things, even new tools, um, to go help marketers do better things, which is really engaging their audience, distributing messages and driving value for their orgs.

Speaker B: Right? Yeah. I mean, if we break it down, I think we've said like, you know, it represents kind of what we would believe would be sort of what you'd want out of your marketing anyway. Right? Like, you want to be able to deliver the business outcomes that, that you're looking for at a reasonable cost and

Speaker A: well, maybe we should back up. So pillar one, um, we think of like AI with marketing or intelligent marketing is how do we infuse the things we're doing today with AI, like sort of underpinning some of that. And then pillar two would be, now you're talking about AI applications specifically, like, do we have avatars or chatbots or things like that that are kind of more like, I don't know, independent of actual marketing activity, they're just running on the side doing things. And I think going back to those two pillars, what you're talking about now is clearly pillar one.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's, I think it's. I mean, I think at the end of the day, the intelligent marketing is sort of a, uh, recognition that like you said, the world is changing around us. And um, part of what I think the promise of this quote unquote AI technology is really meant to be is, you know, we're spending less of our time on work that is kind of menial or due to the nature of having to click 15 clicks to get something done or 3 hours to do something, a system can help us do that. And I think that if you're a marketing agency in 2025 and certainly over the next three years, and you're not really embracing that, both, I think, underpinning what you're already doing, but also I think on the front end of your messaging, I think it creates a bit of a, of a challenge around clients, you know, picking you up as a, as a prospective agency. Right. And I think that whenever we're with a client, you know, the number one concern they have is, you know, are you bringing enough value to the table? And it's, ah, it's not like a concern of our clients. I just mean generally, whenever you're, whenever you're hiring anybody to do something for you, you want to know that they're, you know, several steps beyond where you are. Right. And that's essentially what we're sort of part of what we're saying with intelligent marketing is that A, we recognize that B, we're starting to pillar one, as you say, embed those things underneath our team, do more with less, pass that value down to our client. But ultimately, as a bigger picture, it's starting to sort of like push this theme that the vision here is that you shouldn't have to necessarily be held back. And over time, as these things become real, and I'm sure we'll talk about how we know they're not fully real yet. You know, a small business, medium business, large business can sort of begin to sort of realize the promise of all this martech and all these digital channels without blowing their brains out. Right.

Speaker A: Well, the word constraint and value, both of those Words are so important here. And I think historically when an organization has realize and run a successful campaign, usually the CEO or even a revenue owner would say, hey, this is great, can we do five more? Well, we can't. Why is that? It took, I don't know, the sum of 500 hours of people's time over the last few months or something like that. Right. But all of a sudden when you're thinking about value and getting time back because of AI's ability to take away some of like the more remedial tasks or you know, the time consuming things, it's not like critical thinking, it's just kind of like executing and doing some of that stuff's really actually happening. It's at a scary, alarming rate. Mhm. So all of a sudden now that question of can we do five more of those? It's like yes, maybe it's actually closer to 10. So I think from a value and impact and just getting the speed, it's really there now. And that's exciting to me. And I think as a strategist, my brain immediately goes to if you can empower AI and these toolings with really smart frameworks that you've cultivated and built and learned over your career and you're just feeding them into AI so we can help organize those 10 or 15 campaigns across different segments with altered messaging, that's such a great place for it. And my recommendation to anyone that I talk to about AI right now is you should be at minimum using it as a collaboration buddy. Upload your frameworks, upload your thesis, your documents, your PowerPoint decks and asking questions. Have it ask you questions.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: What are the top five questions you see or holes in this deck? What do you. To me, that's really the starting place. I don't know if you should be using it primarily as a research tool, but certainly as a collaboration and having people poke holes in it. Particularly if you feel you're the most senior marketer in your org and you don't have someone who you can really paying off for ideas and be challenged in a marketing way. This is a great, great, um, copilot or collaborator.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I think going on to like um, you know, a place where maybe not even like digital avatars and that level of like kind of craziness that I think we certainly see. I think if we talk a little bit about what we're doing right now to sort of, I think push this shift and I think it'll come through the website because that's going to have to be where everybody can sort of visualize it. Our staff even can kind of see, oh, what are we talking about when we look at all this? Because people in the day to day, you know, they're using the Geminizer, whatever, they're using ChatGPT Notion AI. We've got dozens of tools probably at this point that have AI enabled into them. They don't really capture that, you know, in terms of just like actually this is a really important piece of Goose digital going forward. And so we talk a little bit about maybe the things that we're doing right now. And you talked about ideation of strategies and kind of getting stuff done. And I think one area that we're doing a lot of is that, plus actually looking at, um, having really strong customized gems or GPTs that are really dialed into a customer's value proposition. And we've got templates that, that lay out exactly the information that we want to capture, the tone of voice and all the brand information. So that when we're building content strategies and executing those content strategies, the draft that we're getting back is like very, very strong. Right. And that could be email landing, page, whatever. Um, so to me, that side of it is just accelerated at an insane pace. If you're doing that really well, you're able to produce a bunch of your content well into the future at high levels of quality that we've never seen before.

Speaker A: Yeah. As you were saying that my head was going to. Do you remember the first five iterations of ChatGPT when it was spitting out images of whatever woman in a church with an apple or something like that? The first one was not great, second was a bit better, third one was leaps and bounds better still, room for improvement. And by the fifth iteration, it was, wow, this is starting to look pretty real.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: And I think that rapid development of quality continues. And it's already gotten so much better. We were just off camera, we were talking about a large organization, um, who had previously resisted AI for a few years. And then this last sort of year into like maybe the first half of 2025, there's been a real shift. You were saying, as far as their adoption and view of AI. It's no longer a void. Don't do it. It's how can we actually use this? We now all of a sudden see the value that perhaps we didn't before.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I think that like, you know, for a lot of organizations, like, I'm sure there's a mix of feelings here and um, I sympathize with organizations because it can be, you know, especially large ones, it can be very unclear. Well, what is this going to mean for us? Like, is this literally going to mean that we're putting our call centers out of business or we're going to be shifting massive amounts of our, of our environment over to AI? And, but also like what's like the

Speaker A: risk side when you're operating a business of that scale? Like, right. What if not to say forget about the human element, but putting that concern aside, what if you go all in on AI? We know very limited amounts of it overall. It's only really been a thing for three, five years from being generous M. What happens if it just completely blows up for unforeseen reasons and now has impacted that whole call center to all of your customers?

Speaker B: Yeah, like equally, we're seeing, uh, a fairly healthy amount of people that are simply not using it and not so much in our business. Although we do have a spectrum of people that would maybe, you know, not think to kind of go there first. And I see we've seen that culture shift where why am I not actually engaging in now I should be in it. Kind of getting into that habit, that habit forming. But I've seen, we've seen a lot of scenarios where they're just not using it. Like people won't use it and uh, it's ego. I think it's. There's a variety of reasons where they just, they probably to your point, like they don't have the knowledge yet where like, why would I use it? You know, like I'm very good at what I do, why would I use it? They haven't quite connected those dots yet where it's like, well actually if you're a designer, one of the things you can use, and we just did this, uh, with a prospect right now, is you can actually do creative critiques. And is it going to be exactly, maybe to a strategist level, probably not. But does it give you something that you didn't quite see before? Or does it give you another point of view that maybe you hadn't considered? Some UI designers have no idea that you can take UIs and stick them in and get that type of feedback right?

Speaker A: Oh, I know. I was saying before too. I'm trying to use AI at least a few times a day across any number of different sort of like, reasons, rationales, like whether it's personal life, organize a dinner plan, or down to like, uh, I'm uploading a framework and asking for a feature feedback and I think I'm just trying to expose it to as many use cases I can to kind of open my brain as to what is possible here.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And to that point there's a lot of people who could use AI, but they're just not sure how it would fit into whatever use case or need they may have. And maybe they go and say, I really like doing this myself though. I don't need to do that. That's okay. But in some cases it's going to be faster.

Speaker B: Yeah. And one of the things on developing this, uh, revised site map and this intelligent marketing vision, we've experimented a lot with, um, these custom LLM customized gems or GPTs where it's got a lot of information about Goose. And we've even gone to the point where we've created sales engineering versions where we're able to drive out, um, sows in our format that we require based on the Google Meet transcripts and with other quick prompts that provide background information. And we're getting back quotes and sow type information much faster than we would be able to do that in the past, certainly in a way that is highly tailored to the client's need. That's another really good example where you might have a sales engineering team or a biz dev team that takes time for them to turn around this stuff and now you're able to accelerate. Um, I want to get to a

Speaker A: point where we have a, like all agencies, we have our standard pitch decks or first call decks, maybe feed it with a few additional slides. Like there's a total of 20 slides. You know, you're probably using 12 to 15 in most sessions. And we can just verbally dictate or maybe, uh, written what the meeting's about. It's an instructionary call with a B2B company in California, SaaS based, and they do, I don't know, med tech or something like that. And then it just spits out the deck and it takes all the slides that are available. And all of a sudden we're an agency that's no longer building decks.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, um, we were talking about how all of our kind of strategies today are based on a lot of these assumptions. So like let's say like our first call deck, you know, we're not, we don't really want to be changing our first call deck all that often. Not because we don't want to, it's just because it's time consuming. And if we're customizing every single pitch, you know, the very first call, it's like it's going to be very labor intensive.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: So what is it? What do we do? Well, we have a really solid first call deck. But you could argue to your point, if gets to the point where Gemini's environment's got, you know, our slide deck and our, and our concepts and it's like, hey, we're going into this meeting and happens to be a California based, you know, winery and they're looking for like some salesforce, you know, marketing cloud and some demand gen support. And plus they need like a strategist to come support them. Xyz Boom. It like puts, puts a much more customized version of that deck together with imagery that matches their environment and just totally changes the whole tone of the meeting. Um, that's what I think is so exciting is like you don't really, you can't see these opportunities right now because all of our assumptions are based on the current environment. Right.

Speaker A: Talk about challenging the norm. So we'll say we want a consistent approach to our sales. Some of it's our sales methodology, some of it's like our inability to make time to build 50 decks in a week or whatever. But what if we said, let's just turn this upside down and start from an AI first approach or mindset and instead of having the same decks with like one or two slides with different

Speaker B: sort of, uh, outputs.

Speaker A: As far as this is what we think we can do for you, Mr. And Mrs. Client. What if it was actually every deck is custom because no longer are we

Speaker B: perfect to do it.

Speaker A: We don't have that constraint.

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker A: And as a result, now every first call deck is wildly different. Still on brand, still like in the tone core. Yeah, but, oh man, that med tech company and the next med tech company. Same company, same industry, vastly different decks. You could actually do that now. We can get a conversation around brand and how you want to like approach that. Yeah, but fundamentally.

Speaker B: But you could do that. I'm sure you could do that too. You could say like, you know, we want to have a couple of core, you know, pieces of information that, that really don't change. Right. And maybe your theming and stuff like that. But the core content around like xyz, uh, like we want to keep that the same. But yeah, you're right. And I think that that's an example of like opportunities that kind of come out of nowhere when you're unconstrained, where it's like, well, why, yeah, why wouldn't we have a deck for every prospect? Why wouldn't we have different creative that we would you know, run in our, in our. Even something basic as a newsletter, like, and adjust things like more rapidly than we might and test more. More rapidly than we might otherwise. Right. That's really exciting stuff.

Speaker A: But I think. So then we're talking about websites. That's kind of how we got here. And what I said to you a while ago is like, I just want to have. It's just one page and it's like it's almost a chatbot. It's like, what do you need?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And you just have this conversation with this like the goose bot.

Speaker B: Yeah, we have this. It's funny because like one of our partners went, tried to launch that site a year and a half ago and it was actually, yeah, it was about almost a full year this month and didn't go so well. So they backed off of it. And I think it was probably just ahead of their time. But yeah, that was the concept of just kind of like, here's what we do. What do you want to know? With some pre built prompts. And it would literally pull back case studies and like customized information depending on what you were looking for. It was pretty wild.

Speaker A: That's probably the future. We're probably still a ways off. But in a more serious note, when we look at the sitemap, I find more than ever because you're right. Like we've historically tried to squeeze two to three, some cases four years out of a current iteration of site. Uh, the more I look at our sitemap now, which I would say is 95% locked in M. Is that like I'm more thinking about how does this sitemap evolve more than any other iteration of a website. It's like, well, we know we're sort of on the precipice of crazy change. We all agree to that. What, uh, it's going to look like, I don't know. But I'm trying to think about it relative to can the bones of the new site stay the same? Recognizing like we're going to see some pretty wild evolution in the next. Call it one to two, maybe three years.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I think that's kind of really what, you know, the whole concept of intelligent marketing is meant to sort of represent for our customers. Right. Like we're trying to go out there and be like, we understand that the world is changing. Um, your marketing should actually be getting better through this change. And that's going to be a combination of um, new opportunities that we really haven't been able to do due to these constraints in the past. Just Volumes and better quality. The quality improvements that we expect the cost associated with. If any marketing teams out there not you know, under, under the, the clear impression that they should be able to do more with less. Like that's not the right expectation. With all of this stuff you really need to challenge yourself to be like well why, why do I think I can sort of write a better sow manually than, than the draft that I might get from the environment first? Right. I mean come on. Like that, that I really think is like one of these things where we are going to see a world where productivity goes up and we're gonna be able to squeeze money out.

Speaker A: So, so there's, there's a few things I think you actually left out. Probably the most important one. So there's a, there's a cost value like of savings. Mhm. And like efficiencies. There's also just new capabilities we just never had before. And then the third one, arguably the most important would be the speed of which we can move and react and launch. Like all kinds of barriers have been just totally wiped away. It work it's really, it's exciting times a bit scary but also anxiety driven because am I keeping up? But the reality is we as marketers now can move so much faster. Uh, so I guess to tie a bow on intelligent marketing, it's really this is the next leap for marketing as far as adding value to your organization and really killing and crushing those objectives that you have and further just driving a sense of whether it's pipeline, brand building, any kind of value. Uh, I just like incrementally bigger, faster speed.

Speaker B: And I think to the extent that the agencies that are out there that have a strong account and strategy practice, you know we were talking about that earlier, really that's where we're gonna see such a shift. Right? Because you're shifting away from a lot of the uh, doers that would traditionally not have the capability to write the brief or consult with a client or these types of things. And now you're shifting that to people that you know, kind of have all that strategy and can execute against even if, even if it's not you know, all of their day to day job. But it could be an account lead that is coming up and rising up to be a strategist where they're able to just sort of execute now and, and go and iterate and iterate and iterate. And that's super exciting I think for the industry because we've talked about this for a long time that we kind of Got Martech to death. You know, over the last 15 years where everything was another subscription, another ad on another widget and marketing kind of became about running technology, you know, and hey, like there's platforms and there's serious platforms and they do a lot of really amazing things if you know how to use them well. But you kind of got stuck in this world where like you know, 60% of the conversation was about this technology stuff and how to. And it's like not about actually marketing and how to connect with our customers. And that I think is really neat because you're going to see this switch where uh, marketing, you know, kind of real marketing comes back. I think to the extent that it's, you know, we, we maintain the strategy and we still have people that know how to do real marketing to that point.

Speaker A: I think anyone who's been in especially B2B circles for, for call it like a decade or more, you've seen like the rise of challengers to market leaders. And it takes something like eight to 10 years, this slow burn and all of a sudden here's this cloud company doing whatever in SaaS and now they're like, oh wow, they've been coming up for a while. I think now with AI and just a way faster approach, you're going to see challengers to market leaders in under two years.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: Like in two years time there will be market leaders that we haven't heard of today. That's my sort of prediction. But it's all based upon speed and the ability to move so much quicker and infinitely bigger.

Speaker B: Yeah, we'll see. All right, so that's the uh, we're blowing the lid off the intelligent marketing

Speaker A: that was our preview and uh, some cool formats and ways that we want to approach some of the stuff moving forward.

Speaker B: Awesome. All right, keep an eye out for the new website. Should be roughly around the mid August timeframe coming soon.