July 18, 2024

Dynamic Pricing, Expiring Email, The Future of GA4, and Bird by Bird

20 minutes

In this Marketing Over Coffee:

Learn about possible new email standards, targeted CRM attacks, the ongoing saga of John’s running tech stack, and more!

Direct Link to File

Brought to you by our sponsors: Wix Studio and NetSuite

Email Changes to be aware of – Expiring email? Unsubscribe prompt after 30 days

The future of GA4

7:22 – 8:13 Wix Studio is the web platform that gives agencies and enterprises the end-to-end efficiency to design, develop and deliver exactly the way they want to!

Dynamic Pricing vs. Surge Pricing

Targeted CRM attacks

12:27 – 13:55 NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, into ONE platform, and ONE source of truth.

Google pauses opioid painkiller policy update

Apple Watch Workout can’t handle audio cues?

Anne Lamott Bird by Bird

Gen AI Course Updates done: Special Discount on the newest Generative AI for Marketing Course! Hands on excercises to put AI to work for you! USE CODE MOC now!

Join John, Chris and Katie on threads, or on LinkedIn: Chris, John, and Katie

Our theme song is Mellow G by Fonkmasters.

Machine-Generated Transcript

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.

John Wall – 00:00

Today’s episode is brought to you by Netsuite and Wix Studio.

Speaker 2 – 00:10

This is marketing over coffee with Christopher Penn and John Wall.

John Wall – 00:18

Good morning. Welcome to marketing over coffee. I’m John Wahl.

Christopher Penn – 00:21

I’m Christopher Penn.

John Wall – 00:22

Okay, we had a bunch of stuff this week. The interesting one was email changes to be aware of. Martech had an article talking about some things changing in the inbox. The lead one was the Apple inbox mail privacy protection program changing and things going on with that. But the interesting one for me was expiring email. Having email with expiration dates that will eventually leave your archives. I don’t know, what’s your thoughts on that stuff? Is expiring email feasible? That seems like just more headache than it’s worth to me.

Christopher Penn – 00:51

It’s interesting because it also presumes that the receiving mail server will comply with those instructions. I don’t know that it’s built into SMTP servers. If it is, it’s probably provider by provider. So perhaps the big ones like Gmail or Yahoo or Hotmail could and would, and it would make sense to do it because obviously if you have self-destructing emails, that will restore disk space at scale. But your Exchange server, your Postfix server, I have no idea if they would even support that or not. And if you are relying on the data deletion feature to clean up your mess, I don’t know that that’s something I wouldn’t necessarily want to rely on.

It also is interesting because when you get email, you kind of have the presumption that you have that email in terms of things like digital chain of evidence. Now that might be relevant if, for example, a vendor sends out an email and says, “Hey, this thing’s on sale”, and they get into a class action lawsuit later. The lawyer is like, “Well, we need the emails that prove that.” And if they are self-destructing emails, that may or may not be a helpful thing. So there’s a lot of — there’s technological hurdles and there’s legal hurdles to that.

John Wall – 02:02

Yeah. And I don’t know, it just seems to me that over time the technology is always to the point where it’s like — now we have — anybody could have the whole internet from the first five years on a flash drive lying around. I mean, there’s — enough storage is not an issue, especially with email. Seems to have done a good job in, limiting. Yeah, I don’t know, we’ll keep an eye on that. Another interesting one was unsubscribe prompt after 30 days. So if somebody’s doing a newsletter and they’re not publishing monthly, kind of automatically opting people out of that. I don’t know. That was another weird one to me. I didn’t see — I mean, I guess that makes sense in some ways, but it just seems like —

John Wall – 02:38

I don’t know. That just seems like way more possible headache than it’s worth.

Christopher Penn – 02:41

It does. And I have to question with a lot of these proposed changes and things, who benefits from all this stuff? Like, who would benefit from self-destructing emails and things? It almost, in some ways, it strikes me as the sort of thing that, say, a consortium of large technology companies who make their money on ads would be pushing to try to reduce the effectiveness of other channels to compel marketers to spend more money on their ads. Call me — call me a conspiracy theorist.

John Wall – 03:09

But I know that’s straight up tinfoil hat territory there. That could not happen with Google.

Christopher Penn – 03:16

Well, it’s funny you mentioned that, because this week I had a chat with some friends who work at a certain very large technology company that manufactures a product called Google Analytics four. And they were saying that there have been — and you’ve seen this in like Reddit forums and stuff like that — but my colleague was saying it’s true a lot of what you’re reading, that Google has essentially been decimated over the last 10 years by having a bunch of senior management who are all top tier consulting firm execs as opposed to technologists and engineers, and they have essentially gutted most of the company to the point where product teams and lines just don’t make sense anymore from a — what is Google good at? The example that they were talking about was Google Analytics used to be its own division.

It had its own building, it had its own team, its own P&L and stuff like that. And it was aligned with Google Ads, but it was an independent product. And then GA4, as part of this — this major change really was about aligning it more closely with Google Ads to have it be more helpful to Google Ads. Well, apparently in the last few years, outside the public eye, Google Analytics, the division, has been moved into Google Ads. And the people responsible for the product itself largely — now this is, from someone who is on the inside — largely are not there anymore. And so Google Analytics is being managed by Google Ads. The product development is entirely around data collection.

They said one of the things that is the highest priority right now is using AI to infer and backfill missing data from all the privacy protections that are taking place. They’re now using machine learning more and more to essentially guess what happened on your website because things like Apple’s browser is no longer showing up and blocking that data. And Google Analytics has really just turned into a data collection mechanism for Google with no benefit to the consumer. They were saying that the Google Analytics four team has absolutely no discussions about small business or midsize business. They are only focused on enterprise because 360 is still a product that’s for sale and they’re only focused on GA4 as it assists the ads business, nothing else. So any of the innovations that you are expecting to see are not there.

Christopher Penn – 05:42

And you can tell this — you and I can tell this as external folks — because Google, if you look at what happened to I/O this year, they showcased, “Hey, we’re putting Gemini in this. Gemini’s in Google Slides now. Gemini’s in Google Docs. Gemini is in Google search.” Gemini is not in Google Analytics, which is the one place where it would actually do some good.

John Wall – 06:01

Right. Right. Where it would help. Yeah, that tracks with everything we’ve seen because there was another article with one of the product managers of GA4 talking about, and yeah, he just slid right into “this is all about making your ads better and more targeted”. The only other interesting one — and we actually, I saw this in an article, I’ll have a link to it — but in Gmail, in the client actually having images and emoticons and a bunch of other stuff showing up, kind of new formatting, which is interesting and does give marketers some opportunities as far as having a graphic on the inbox page as opposed to opening the message. I hate to have a bad attitude about it, but I just see that getting ugly real fast unless — I will have to look though, too.

John Wall – 06:40

I don’t know, maybe this is one of those things where you have to be approved as a partner and it’s going to be a really high bar to entry to start doing this stuff.

Christopher Penn – 06:48

Yeah. A lot of the changes that you’re seeing from the big technology companies are all about — in many ways, it’s just concentrating the power of the folks who have the deepest pockets, unfortunately. So for the independent marketer, there is not a lot of opportunity. This is something that I was actually chatting about with Katie this morning, is like for small to mid-sized businesses, all of the big technology plays out there really are not meant for us. They’re meant to put us out of business.

John Wall – 07:23

Okay. Well, fighting back for all businesses of every size, of course, is Wix and Wix Studio. We want to thank them for their support of the show. I’ve only got one minute to tell you about Wix Studio, the web platform for agencies and enterprises. Whether you manage 10 sites or 1,000, here are a few things you can do from start to finish in a minute or less on studio: set up native marketing integrations in a click; reuse templates, widgets and sections across sites; create a seamless handover by adding tutorials, guides and more to client dashboards; work on the same canvas at the same time with all your team members; and leverage best-in-class SEO defaults like server-side rendering and automated structured data markup across all your Wix sites. Time’s up, but the list keeps going.

Step into Wix Studio and see for yourself. Check it out over at wixstudio.com and we thank them for their support of the show. Oh, there was a lot of press this week about dynamic pricing, and that’s been an interesting thing. I wanted to get your take on that. The news item that dropped this week was Walmart testing out some on-display pricing. Instead of having printed-out price tags on every item out there, it being a display that could be updated. And, the angst-grabbing headline was 12 times a minute changing the price, so, as if you would throw stuff in your cart and by the time you got to the register it would cost twice as much and you’d be really angry about that. I don’t know.

John Wall – 08:43

I just feel that this is the future and the way it’s going to go, and it’s not like — well, I don’t know. I say it’s not like there’s going to be surge pricing at Walmart while you’re shopping, but I guess that is possible.

Christopher Penn – 08:53

We already have it if you’ve ever tried to book a flight.

John Wall – 08:57

Oh, yeah. Well, and everybody points to Uber, surge pricing is like — this is what you don’t want to do because everybody’s going to hate you.

Christopher Penn – 09:04

Right. But with Uber, there’s a bit more transparency compared to booking a flight. Like, you have no idea why this ticket 20 minutes ago was $126, now it’s $1,700. What the heck is going on? It’s interesting because dynamic pricing — you know what? I actually need to get a tinfoil hat because I need to go upstairs and make one because it clearly is tinfoil hat territory day. In the last two years, there has been a lot of discussion about consumer inflation, about the price of groceries, the price of this, price of that, etc. Dynamic pricing makes that very difficult to prove, because you can walk through the store and use your smartphone to take pictures, but the price could change in seconds.

And suddenly any argument you have — or it’s kind of like, when the food inspector is coming to the restaurant, you clean extra. Well, that day, I could totally see someone from Bureau of Labor Statistics stopping, and all of a sudden, the prices are all really low. Like, “Oh, look! In the aisle this guy’s in, the prices are really low” while he walks by. And then they go back to normal.

John Wall – 10:11

That is crazy. I hadn’t thought about that. You could go that far, couldn’t you? As far as if someone’s a frequent buyer and they’ve surrendered all the data, you could give them specialized pricing on everything. Although — yeah. I don’t know, that’s — I now see these mobs of shoppers, like, following certain people around to get the pricing of the day.

Christopher Penn – 10:30

Yeah, I don’t think it would be that instantaneous, but it’s certainly a lot — the infrastructure allows for it. At the end of the day, what’s going on there is — I mean, it’s basic economics. You’re basically trying to match your pricing to keep the supply demand curve as profitable as possible, and whatever that looks like, balancing that somehow with customer retention. But in a lot of places, particularly for retail stuff, in a lot of places, Walmart’s the only game in town. All the other stores are closed, so they may not have a national monopoly, but in, like, a 50-mile radius, they may have a monopoly on things.

Christopher Penn – 11:08

And so in those situations, an algorithm can optimize the pricing and profitability of that specific retail location, store by store, and make life very expensive for people within a 50-mile radius of that store. And so this is — this is the challenge with a lot of these algorithms, is that they are — they are balanced for bookkeeping purposes and accounting purposes, but they are not balanced for the human beings, and it can make life very difficult for people.

John Wall – 11:38

I don’t know. Not enough attention has been paid to what you were just talking about, because I was out buying clothes for my son last night. We were shopping for some stuff, and I was thinking about how when I shop for clothes, there were all these stores. You had all these choices. We literally have one choice, unless we’re going to drive more than an hour to a major metropolitan area — we could drive an extra 20 to Target. Otherwise, Walmart is the store in the area. So it’s just amazing how that has changed the whole face of retail as far as what’s going on.

Christopher Penn – 12:08

Yeah. And the irony is the only thing that may be stopping absolute monopoly pricing pressure is Amazon, because like, “Oh, it’s too much here at Walmart. I’ll order from Amazon.”

John Wall – 12:18

Yeah, right. It’s actually — it becomes convenience is the thing. It’s like, if you have to have it tomorrow, well, now Amazon’s not an option, but otherwise you’re going to go through them. We just have to take a second. We want to thank NetSuite by Oracle for their support of marketing over coffee. For all of our clients, there comes a point where they get large enough and they’re managing so many systems that you’re just caught up in the bureaucracy of it all. You’re actually spending more maintaining all this complexity. Smart businesses reduce costs and headaches when they get large enough by graduating to NetSuite by Oracle. NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR into one platform and one source of truth.

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John Wall – 13:43

Head to netsuite.com/coffee. That’s netsuite.com/coffee. Again, netsuite.com/coffee. And we thank NetSuite by Oracle for their support of the show. I had an interesting piece about a CRM breach, a major vendor who we’re not going to call out because they’re people we like, but had — it was funny — a small subset of clients that had been hacked, literally less than one 10th of 1% of their clientele. But it was interesting going back and looking. I noticed that there are these breaches, but the thing is that they’re specifically targeted. Like a previous one, it was all cryptocurrency companies, they got breached as part of the CRM thing. So that just struck me as really interesting, this idea that somebody would take a certain vertical where they know they can do social scams or scrape data because of what they do, and then being able to attack them over on the CRM side. I just thought that was kind of fascinating as far as — and obviously, all CRM vendors — I mean, yes they get breached — but I have to say they’re probably the most vigilant and have the best defenses against this kind of stuff, because that’s their model and that’s what they’re doing. That’s just interesting. Have you come across anything similar as far as specific types of — well, of course, we always see — unfortunately, it’s normally the senior citizens that get scammed with this stuff because they’re the easiest target, and so I guess that’s just what it is.

Christopher Penn – 15:10

So there’s part of that. One of the things that cybersecurity folks are wrestling with right now is it turns out that generative AI tools, particularly tools that are capable of both regular AI and coding, are extremely good at breaking into things. Because unlike a human hacker, they just continue to write and rewrite their code until they get something that works, that gets past the security measure. And when you have a GPU cluster of your own, or you are sponsored by a hostile nation state, you have better hacking tools today than you have ever had in the world. And so this is a real concern for pretty much every digital business, is —

Christopher Penn – 15:51

— is making sure that you’re doing your best on your front, making sure two-factor authentication is turned on everything, making sure that your employees know how social engineering works and what scams are going to look like. And, scams going to look like, “Hey, that sounds like my CFO’s voice on the phone. What’s the internal password that we have for — to avoid transferring money?” But generative AI allows everything to be faster and better, and that includes bad actors.

John Wall – 16:17

Yeah, so there’s more opportunity to take advantage of that. I can see that.

Christopher Penn – 16:21

Yep. Here’s the thing is, it requires less skill than ever. If you have a really capable model, you can just give it a super stupid prompt like, “Hey, here’s the login page to this — this website, Wells Fargo bank. Find me a working login”, and then let it do all the heavy lifting of writing the code and trying to solve the problem with an — with agent-based networks. It enables skill-less hackers to make progress, and it makes skillful hackers really talented.

John Wall – 16:51

Yeah, that’s the real — script kiddies are one thing, but real hackers having even more powerful tools, that’s definitely a frightening prospect across the board. So an interesting article — this is — I — I have nothing on this, but Google pausing its opioid painkiller policy for advertising. That’s something that we’ve never actually run down the — on the topic list as far as opioids and how that works into advertising and pharma. I was actually just going to throw that out there, if anybody out there is a specialist in that area and can talk more about that, we would love to hear more about that because that just seems like such a dangerous area to wade into with so much going on. Even with all the money in pharma, Google is not ready to just jump in there and go with that. I don’t know.

John Wall – 17:37

Any thoughts on that as far as, like, where that could end up or what that should be doing?

Christopher Penn – 17:41

I have no idea. I mean, this is the thing is all this stuff is going in so many different directions. It’s really — I have no idea.

John Wall – 17:52

Yeah, that was the thing going down the rundown for this week. It was like, we kind of joke about how, like, every week it gets more insane, but this was one of those weeks where there were just like 20 things where I was like, “Oh my God, these are all different buckets on fire.” That —

Christopher Penn – 18:05

Yeah, everything’s on fire.

John Wall – 18:07

Yeah, yeah, it’s — it’s always moving, always changing. Totally random. Oh yeah, okay. So something also changing and different is Elton John at Dreamforce. I had mentioned that earlier, I don’t know how the heck that happened, but here we are with that on gear watch. I had the — I had been encouraged to try the Apple Watch workout. I have not been able to get the audio cues to work with that, and I have a support call into Apple about that to see if they can work that. But the good news is actually, Rungap, the app that I use to synchronize all that stuff, has finally got Adidas Running working. So it’s insane, I have a whole tech stack that I have to keep maintained for running, which seems totally ridiculous, but here we are on that also.

John Wall – 18:52

That was the story with that. Yeah. July, normally we expect things to be slowing down, but it’s been total insanity, too. On the business front, there’s all kinds of stuff that’s been moving and we’ve got a lot going on. Yeah, there’s a chance — it’s not locked in stone, so we’re not going to talk too much about it, but you may be doing a tour of Israel coming up soon, which is a big load of travel for you, but that’s going to be — that’ll be a new one to check off the list, at least.

Christopher Penn – 19:19

Exactly, that’s all I’ll say about that. It’s always interesting places.

John Wall – 19:23

Okay. And two more before we go out the door. Just on the media front, Anne Lamott’s _Bird by Bird_ is a fantastic book on writing. If you have not read that, it’s a classic, actually, but I just got around to it. I had not read it on its first run through, and so I can heartily recommend that, and so I wanted to put that out there. And then Rick Rubin’s _The Creative Act: A Way of Being_ is another great book talking about the creative process and how to get things done, how to get content out of there, and what you have to fight through to make things like that happen. So I wanted to give a plug for both those, we’ll have links to those in the show notes.

John Wall – 19:57

And of course you can sign up for the Marketing over Coffee newsletter over on the website. And don’t forget the text line at 617-812-5494, but that’s going to do it for this week, so until next week, enjoy the coffee.

Christopher Penn – 20:09

Enjoy the coffee.

Speaker 2 – 20:11

You’ve been listening to Marketing over Coffee. Christopher Penn blogs at christopherspenn.com. Read more from John J. Wall at jw51.com. The Marketing over Coffee theme song is called Melo G by Funk Masters, and you can find it at Music Alley from Mevio or follow the link in our show notes.

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