Funnel Reboot

Episode 206

There’s no denying that ChatGPT and other GenerativeAI’s do  amazing things.

Extrapolating how far they’ve come in 3 years, many can get carried away with thinking GenerativeAI will lead to machines reaching General and even Super Intelligence. We’re impressed by how clever they sound, and we’re tempted to believe that they’ll chew through problems just like the most expert humans do. 

But according to many AI experts, this isn’t what’s going to happen.  

The difference between what GenerativeAI can do and what humans can do is actually quite stark. Everything that it gives you has to be proofed and fact-checked. 

The reason why is embedded in how they work. It uses a LLM to crawl the vast repository of human writing and multimedia on the web. It gobbles them up and chops them all up until they’re word salad. When you give it a prompt, it measures what words it’s usually seen accompanying your words, then spits back what usually comes next in those sequences.  The output IS very impressive, so impressive that when one of these was being tested in 2022 by a Google Engineer with a Masters in Computer Science named Blake Lemoine, became convinced that he was talking with an intelligence that he characterized as having sentience. He spoke to Newsweek about it, saying:  

“During my conversations with the chatbot, some of which I published on my blog, I came to the conclusion that the AI could be sentient due to the emotions that it expressed reliably and in the right context. It wasn't just spouting words.” 

All the same, GenerativeAI shouldn’t be confused with what humans do. Take a published scientific article written by a human. How they would have started is not by hammering their keyboard until all the words came out, they likely started by asking a “what if”, building a hypothesis that makes inferences about something,  and they would have chained this together with reasoning by  others, leading to experimentation, which proved/disproved the original thought. The output of all that is what’s written in the article. Although GenerativeAI seems smart, you would too if you skipped all the cognitive steps that had happened prior to the finished work.

This doesn’t mean General Artificial Intelligence is doomed. It means there’s more than one branch of AI - each is good at solving different kinds of problems. One branch called Causal AI doesn't just look for patterns, but instead figures out what causes things to happen  by building a model of something in the real world. That  distinguishes it from GenerativeAI, and it’s what enables this type of AI to  recommend decisions that rival the smartest humans. The types of decisions extend into business areas like marketing, making things run more efficiently, and delivering more value and ROI.

My guest is the Global Head of AI at (EY) Ernst & Young, having also been an analytics executive at Gartner and CSL Behring and graduating from DePaul with an MBA. 

He has written five  books. His 2024 book is about the branch of AI technology we don’t hear very much about, Causal AI. So let’s go to Chicago now to speak with John Thompson.

Chapter Timestamps

0:00:00 Intro

00:04:36 Welcome John

00:09:05 drawbacks with current Generative AI

00:16:09 problems causal AI is a good fit for

00:22:47 Way Generative AI can help with causal

00:26:50 PSA

00:28:08 How DAGs help in modeling

00:38:36 what is Causal Discovery

00:47:52 contacting John; checking out his books

Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.

Episode 205 

Rich Brooks is founder and president of flyte new media, a digital agency in Portland, Maine.  He founded The Agents of Change a weekly podcast that has over 550 episodes. He is a nationally recognized speaker on using digital channels like search, social media and mobile for marketing to your audience. Rich also hosts the Agents of Change conference which takes place October 9th and 10th both virtually and in his hometown of Portland, Maine.

Timestamps/Chapters

0:00:00 Intro

00:02:49 welcome Rich

00:08:56 using GPT to make text seo-friendly

00:17:32 blending generative text with your own content

00:22:47 expanding to image & video

00:27:11 PSA

00:27:45 managing projects and events with AI

00:38:36 when to use a human vs aGPT

00:47:52 info on Rich. his podcast & his conference

Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.

Episode 204

Eyes are important. Each of us puts heavy weight on our vision when forming a mental model of the world around us.Seeing is believing. This is so important in business, almost every time people meet, some visual tool guides the discussion - this practically essential object is a presentation, specifically a data presentation.

But knowing what we know about our visual senses, creating something that’s tuned for people’s minds…as well as their hearts, takes combining neuroscience, storytelling, emotion, persuasion, design and effective communication. 

That’s a lot to know, but our guest can help you do it. For over a decade, she’s helped those in the digital marketing and web analytics communities transform their  presentations from snoozefests into experiences that inspire action

She’s a workshop leader and keynote speaker. We’re going to talk about the book she came out with in 2024 “Present Beyond Measure.”  Let’s go south of NYC to the Jersey shore to talk with Lea Pica.

Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.

Chapter Timestamps:

0:00:00   Intro

00:04:23 Welcome Lea Pica

00:09:42 know the stakeholders you are presenting to

00:18:04 Building meeting's name around message

00:32:14 PSA

00:33:07 Parsing your content into digestible-sized ideas

00:40:08 using story arc structure to make slides

00:48:05 keeping data accurate in graphs

01:01:27 Listener-exclusive offer by Lea

Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.

Episode 203: 

How many words does a message need to be for it to be useful? Would you believe under 35 words, or under 160 characters? Here are some examples:

Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address: “We cannot dedicate. We cannot consecrate we cannot hallow this ground. The world will little note nor long. Remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” 

Suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst declared, “We are here not because we are law-breakers; we are here in our efforts to become law-makers.”

Henry David Thoreau, in his book Walden, on experiencing Nature should be accessible to all, regardless of social or economic status. “The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's abode”. 

JFK “the goal, before this decade is out, [is] of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.”

Pierre Trudeau: proposed in 1967 that Canada should decriminalize homosexuality. He said “The view we take is, there's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.”

Hilary Clinton 2008  when she lost out to Barack Obama for the nomination to run for president said "we weren't able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time," but added proudly, "it's got about 18 million cracks in it," a tally of her primary votes.

Having heard those, you’ll agree that this is doable. 

Someone who believes a concise strategy is what it takes to lead people 

What’s more, she believes we must show them this learned skill so they can craft their strategies and develop into leaders themselves.  Our guest is storyteller, a framework-maker, a brand-builder, who talks about strategy, communication skills, and how to forge your own path. She is the CMO for a security technology firm called Field Effect. Shea Cole is a wife and mom and  a 2024 Recipient Ottawa’s top 40 under forty.

Timestamps/Chapters:

00:00:00 Intro

00:04:23 Welcome Shea Cole

00:11:27 Build deck & meeting around vision

00:18:04 Slide 1

00:29:20 PSA

00:30:00 Slides 2 through 6

00:36:25 Adding parts that turn strategy into dollars

00:46:06 Contacting Shea

Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.

Episode 202

One of the most famous western philosophers of all time is GWF Hegel. He influenced other thinkers like Karl Marx, Soren Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre. He lectured at the universities of Jena, heidelberg and from 1818 until 1831, at Berlin. As a matter of fact, his lectures there drew students from all over campus, to the point that the belltower at the University would sound its bell to announce the start of Hegel’s lectures

People may have flocked to hear him, but that doesn’t mean they understood Hegel. One student who went on to write a biography of him was Karl Rosenkranz, who said “His lectures were not clear and systematic presentations, but profound expositions of the inner movement of concepts, which often raised more questions than they answered”…..in another part, he said “The students often complained that Hegel was difficult to understand.”

Many moons ago, I was a Political Science major, in which I had to take a philosophy course that covered Hegel - I had the toughest time understanding him and Hegel still confuses me  to this day. I read & re-read his words, but I don’t get what he’s saying. 

Same with Superintelligent AI like ChatGPT - when we ask it questions, there always seems to be a randomness factor. Sometimes it gives you amazing results, while other times it leaves you scratching your head at its hallucinations…its stupidity. 

If you have this problem, it might not be the AI—it might be your prompts! There are hacks to how you craft them - and this has given rise to a whole field - prompt engineering. 

Our guest co-founded a 50 person marketing agency called Ladder. He has designed courses on LinkedIn Learning & Udemy that 350,000 people have taken. And he was a very early user of Large Language Models - the brains behind Generative AI. 

In 2023 he came on Ep 168 of this show for the book “Marketing Memetics.” In 2024 he came out with an O’Reilly book titled: Prompt Engineering for Generative AI. Let’s go to Liverpool, England to talk with Mike Taylor.

Chapter Timestamps

0:00:00 Intro

00:03:28 Welcome Mike

00:11:27 Expressing all that's needed for a GPT to produce good response

00:20:24 Using AI context window

00:34:48 PSA

00:35:26 Training GPT on proprietary data

00:41:19 Agentic use of GPT

00:47:52 Training GPT for writing

For links to all people, products and concepts mentioned, go to Episode 202’s shownotes page.

Episode 201:

While our guest wasn't the one who invented content marketing, by founding the  Content Marketing Institute, Joe Pulizzi became its standard-bearer. For decades now he has shown  marketers how to make their marketing better by building a media presence that directly connects them to their audience. 

These days, Joe is saying this model applies to a much wider populace. He's showing how individuals can make a go of having businesses that are 100% content-based. He's urging these people, formerly known as the audience, to go make their own audience. He calls this type of person a content entrepreneur. 

This business model’s definition has two criteria. First is that content is the vehicle used to market the product. We all know this as Content Marketing. It lets buyers take samplings of a business model where they present the skills they've acquired and 

The next criteria - content must also be the product. Unlike experts who work full-time as a teacher, writer or consultant who sell their expertise based on their own time - be it in increments of hours or years. 

Content entrepreneurs get to craft and sell multiple products without committing their time. Instead, they sell newsletters, courses, books, community-access and other products to the point their audience consumes so actively, it generates high-enough earnings to support Their livelihood. It’s possible today to form an entrepreneurial venture based completely on content.

This isn’t exactly a  typical Funnel Reboot topic, but we have just surpassed 200 shows and now that we’re starting on a new bicentenary. Let’s use this chance to go in a different direction, try something new.

 So listen in as we go to Cleveland Ohio to speak a second time with our guest, and founder of Tilt Publishing, Joe Pulizzi.

Timestamps/Chapters:

0:00:00      Intro 00:04:41    Origins of the Content Entrepreneur idea 00:11:21    Content mktg's more than a wrapper 00:20:27    Audience vs community 00:23:11    PSA 00:23:52    Thinking of offers for your audience 00:31:13    Having media calendars 00:36:11    Business model may incorporate web3 00:45:34    About CEX & Joe's book

For links to all things mentioned, go to the show 201's shownotes page at the funnelreboot.com website. 

Episode 200

Podcasts are tiny time capsules, preserving moments of wisdom and insight. Every time I revisit past episodes, I am reminded of how insightful our guests have been. Certain themes consistently emerge, echoed by guests from the very beginning of the podcast to just yesterday. The cost of ignoring these insights is so high that they bear repeating.

Tune in to our latest episode where I share six aspects of marketing that I didn't know when I first started this podcast. Please listen in on these valuable pieces of wisdom.

Links to all episodes that featured the people mentioned are in the Show Notes.

Episode 199

Today’s topic is AI and ML, and though you may think this doesn’t concern marketing, we need to acknowledge how it’ll shift things.

Up to now, marketing was done on the premise that for a given audience shown a message, some  average percentage, would act on it. With AI, we’re now able to look at individual audience members and predict how each of them would act upon a message, and at the opportune moment we could have the message show up to each one of them. Goodbye analyzing what happened with crude audience averages, Hello to using detailed data to predict what’s likely to happen. 

With AI holding such promise, why don’t more companies hand things over to AI? I had thought it’s held up by a lack of technical people who know how to do this, but our guest says we’ve had enough technical expertise - He himself was previously one of those data people, and his expertise wasn’t enough to do the job.  He says AI initiatives are held back by those running business functions like marketing who haven’t made the business case and collaborated with the data people to implement this. 

My guest is a leading consultant and former Columbia University and UVA Darden professor. He is the founder of the long-running Machine Learning Week conference series, a frequent keynote speaker, and author of the bestselling Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die. In 2023 he authored “The AI playbook”

Let’s talk to Eric Siegel.

Timestamps/Chapters:

0:00:00       Intro 00:01:37    Welcome Eric Siegel 00:01:56    Barrier we face isn't technical know-how 00:06:05    Despite a strong start - AI's been slow to spread 00:11:17    Process a business needs to implement ML 00:27:41    building a custom algorithm 00:29:45    PSA 00:52:32    The human-side of the switchover 00:54:03    Contacting Eric

Links to all people and concepts mentioned are in the shownotes on the Funnel Reboot site.

Episode 198

A pretty widely held view in the world of B2B products is that sales has gotten harder, not easier. It’s not that buyers aren’t buying. By definition, buying is something they do. But in the example of software, some sales reps won’t even know they were being evaluated, let alone passed up for a rival’s product. Only the winning vendor knows that that account uses them for that specific function in their technology stack. All other companies are in the dark.  

But are they really? Another way to look at this is that every vendor has information that could be valuable to others. You can find many buyers stacks with products having some overlap but that largely complement each other. As proof, note that lots of these products even integrate with each other because of buyer demand. 

Should vendors consider collaborating with vendors they compete against? Aren’t we supposed to hate the competition?

We don’t have to. A famous example of that was Apple’s announcement in 1997 of the deal it struck with Microsoft. Steve Jobs defended the deal saying  “If we want to move forward…we have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose.”

Zooming to today’s reality, It makes a lot of sense for vendors to collaborate as part of an Ecosystem. By pooling their data together with their indirect competitors, they can see internal buying patterns. Those vendors who hitch their data wagons together get around the ‘nobody talks to our sales rep’ problem, because one of their partners already has the info that rep needs. Using this intel helps them come first in the race for their product to be selected to go in the buyer’s stack. 

Our guest today got a Science & Engineering degree from Princeton University and after a stint in the investment world, he dove into co-founding startups. The first was business intelligence platform RJMetrics and the other was cloud data pipeline company Stitch, both of which he saw through to successful exits. 

His latest role is as Co-Founder of a platform that safely shares data among companies for this kind of partner-based selling.

Outside of work, He is a Trustee for one of America’s top centers of science education and development And an improv comedy performer, in a  team that has performed over 100 shows together.

This husband, father of two, is very proud to call Philadelphia home. Let's head there now to meet Bob Moore.

Timestamps / Chapters

0:00:00 Intro

00:03:46 Bob’s thesis on how sales is broken

00:11:21 Ecosystems are cause for hope

00:26:13 PSA

00:26:53 Revamping corporate partner practices

00:31:38 Pooling together data

00:55:06 Contacting Bob

Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for Episode 198

Episode 197

Today, we are going to talk about how those of us who sell things find new buyers once we’ve exhausted our own audiences. We involve partners, and we can do this in a few ways. These partners may have high-traffic sites or be social media influencers. We are trying to use someone else's channel to reach their audience, hoping they will buy from us.

Alternatively, we might be the ones who are influential or have a large audience that brands want to reach, so they pay us to be their marketing channel. The name for teaming up like this is affiliate marketing.

Today’s guest came to affiliate marketing through dabbling in online gambling. He watched the incentives sites put out to attract players, and then in 2010, he created a website that reviewed gambling affiliate programs called Gaming Affiliates Guide. This site’s traffic led him to become, you guessed it, an affiliate. Over time, he managed several gambling affiliate sites.

As you progress in this field, you always hit a ceiling with this marketing channel. No matter whether you’re the one needing traffic and paying for it, or the one who has traffic and is turning it into money, everyone gets a headache tracking it. As our guest was deeply involved at this point, getting paid to manage affiliate sites, he saw numerous problems in this industry and saw a way to solve them.

There were already applications that reported affiliate activity, but he saw these technologies' shortcomings. With his engineering degree from the University of Toronto, which had taught him how to develop things, he joined up with partners to create a SaaS tool of their own: StatsDrone.

Having scratched an itch he experienced earlier in his career, he now heads a team whose tool addresses affiliate challenges.

Let’s go to Montreal and hear from John Wright.

Chapter Timestamps:

0:00:00 Intro

00:03:35 Welcome John Wright

00:06:57 Difficulty with Affiliate tracking

00:11:27 Postbacks and tracking methods

00:18:48 tracking dynamic variables

00:23:14 PSA

00:23:54 Tracking affiliate dollars

00:42:13 Contacting John

For complete links to the People, Products and Concepts mentioned in the show, go to the episode’s page on the Funnel Reboot site.