AI in Marketing: How to Integrate AI & Agile for Business Growth

Hey, I'm Guy Powell and welcome to the next episode of the Backstory on Marketing and AI. If you haven't already done so, please visit ProRelevant. com and sign up for all of these episodes and podcasts. I am the author of the recently released book, The Post COVID Marketing Machine, Prepare Your Team to Win.

And you can find out more information on that, as well as on my upcoming book, The AI Marketing Machine. And you can find that information on that at MarketingMachine. ProRelevant. com. Today, I'm interviewing Melissa Reeve. And let me tell you a little bit about her. She has 25 years experience as a marketing leader, and she is passionate about helping teams navigate the exciting worlds of agile marketing and ai.

Her deep roots in Agile, combined with her fresh perspective on ai, make her a trusted guide for organizations looking to integrate AI into marketing. Melissa is the co-founder of the Agile Marketing Alliance and Marketing frontier.ai. Melissa, welcome. So good to have you.

Guy, you make me sound like a superstar, so thanks for that warm introduction, and it's a pleasure to be on the show.

Oh, you definitely are a superstar. As we've been talking behind the scenes, it's pretty clear you know a lot of what's going on in the marketing and AI space, so I'm so glad to have you. So tell us how you got involved in marketing and AI. What's your back story there?

The marketing piece is interesting.

I, my, my roots are in Japanese literature and language but Japan Inc. Took a turn right after I, I graduated from college, so marketing was the next best thing, and it really combined my love of creativity with the love of analytics and that was at the time When we were going through this similar revolution this thing called the internet was coming on the scene.

ene in Full force November of: 2022

Yeah, and it certainly has changed. It's a night and day. That's for sure. When I think back, even, a year or two ago, and I say how did I write a, a brochure or whatever? And I think about how often I'm in chat GPT, even for the simplest kind of questions. And just by thinking I wonder what chat GPT would say about this.

And it, it has really changed everything.

I was at a meetup earlier today, and one of the things we were kicking around was changes in buyer behavior, and the speaker gave an example of where she was in Target, she took a picture of the game aisle, she uploaded that into Perplexity, and then she asked perplexity to help her pick a game that was going to be suitable for teens, and that's just one small example about how AI and AI shopping is going to just turn things around and change buyer behavior with huge implications for marketers.

Yeah, and even for Google and for Amazon as well, you think about Google it has that that AI response right at the top. I don't even get down to the paid search anymore. And and Google's apparently Google's income or revenues have already started to to level off.

Because so many people are using that as opposed to clicking on a site and not getting the answer and then clicking on another site and not getting the answer. So it's that has absolutely changed the way we interface with what we used to do to go shopping, which was do search for information and use Google as a key component of that.

Yeah, absolutely. I had my own use case the other day where I had a duvet cover. I wanted essentially the same thing. I could have gone, looking through thousands of websites and I just took a picture of it and got some equivalent options. I never could have imagined what would have dethroned Google, but I think we might be there.

Yeah. And as an aside, it gets off. But, you have the the government now worried about whether Google is a monopoly. The world has passed that monopoly by. It's Google's now got a whole other business situation to worry about. Anyway, tell us a little bit, you're with Marketing Frontier.

Tell us about that.

Thanks for that. That opening there, Guy. I really appreciate it. So marketing frontier is focused on helping marketers integrate AI beyond the tools. So there are a lot of companies out there who will tell you about your use cases. And of course, we're happy to do that as well.

But we recognize the Especially in enterprise organizations that there needs to be some fundamental shifts in terms of mindset and workflow, the people and processes side that needs to happen when you're integrating a I at large scale, and we'll talk about that more towards the end of the show. But that's essentially what we're doing.

Yeah let's talk a little bit further about that because it sounds like you've worked really helping marketers navigate change and marketing teams and working together and putting processes in place and maybe share your journey a little bit in terms of what drew you to focus on A. I. And the integration of A.

I. And marketing.

Yeah, so that is a part we skipped in my background, which is I am the founder of the Agile Marketing Alliance and have spent some time in the Agile space. And for those listeners who may not be familiar with Agile, it it came out of software development. It's a way to work cross functionally.

It's a way to work very iteratively. It allows teams to adapt to change. It allows them to align around high value work, and it allows them to eliminate things like bottlenecks and reduce handoffs. And I see that as AI comes on the scene, and as we change essentially our workflow processes we've talked about automation.

What happens in automation instead of going from Somebody writing the copy to somebody doing the design to somebody integrating it to somebody reviewing it and saying, maybe we should have two versions because we need an A B split test. We're going to get to this place fairly rapidly where we have that entire thing automated.

And instead of doing an A B test, we do A to infinity testing because the A I will be able to generate multiple versions, thousands of versions. Test those and do integrate some machine learning to see which one of those is really effective. We see roles starting to change to be more technical, like we, we talked about earlier.

And we see processes collapsing. We see the rise of a marketing generalist that can work across these aut, these autonomous marketing pipelines. What is that going to disrupt? That's going to disrupt people in processes. Yes, you're going to need the technology in place, but you're also going to be needing to think about how are we going to change roles, how are we going to change skill sets, how are we going to update our workflows.

And that is an entire area of AI and marketing that is just emerging.

Yeah, interesting and I see your point and I think that makes a lot of sense. I think the hardest one and I think the one that marketers hate to deal with though is the one on the end, which is the legal compliance and the legal review.

And and one of our clients is in a regulated industry and and they suffer with it so badly. And they can barely get out what they need to get out on time because of the legal review steps. And here we are, and here you are, talking about we want to do an A B test or an A infinity test.

And how do we get that process set so that we can, on the one hand, Significantly improve our marketing effectiveness and on the other hand not have to invest in Another five lawyers to be able to review all that and I

will I will just give a shout out to a company called hast I think it must be from the netherlands because it's a H A S T dot IO caveat.

I have not used this this product, but it is focused on a I powered content compliance. And so I think we're going to see that as well. So much of that legal review fits the criteria of a I. It's repetitive. It can be well defined. And hopefully, that type of automated compliance will free the lawyers up to do their highest value work as well.

Yeah, I would think that and I don't know, I'll have to look that up HAST or HAST, I don't know what it is, but, probably

HAST, yeah.

Yeah, probably HAST, but in any case. If you could use, let's say you did do an A to infinity or even an A to a hundred kind of a, or an A to ten. If you could use AI to get at least the big things out of the way, or at least, show a flag on these three here, these are probably not going to work.

Or maybe with these kind of changes, they're going to be more likely to work. That you may actually also be able to improve and speed and accelerate. The amount of time the lawyers need to review these A to 100s or A to infinities.

Yeah, I agree with you. And I think the point to capture here is that when something along the factory line, I'm going to use that analogy again, speeds up, it shifts the bottleneck.

And theory of constraints. You're always going to have a bottleneck. And so we just have to optimize to that bottleneck and know that's going to exist. Figure out where it is and see how what we can do to not create huge backups behind it.

Yeah, and you're so right, you relieve a bottleneck over here and you end up with another one over there.

So what do you see is when you're trying to integrate AI into the marketing organization, what do you see as the biggest challenges that organizations face?

It's interesting because I've shared this autonomous marketing pipeline vision with a few people, this idea of the marketing factory, and when I share it with the enterprise organizations, they're like, no way, because they know the politics involved, and there is territorialism we have people who have been rewarded for a certain way of behaving all of their careers.

And so ultimately, it is culture and mindset, which is always the case. Those are the two hardest things to change in an organization. And I think with AI, it's going to be no different. You're going to have your early adopters, you're going to have your laggards. You're gonna have people who gets mired down in politics and won't be able to create these flattened organizations I think we're in for an interesting journey.

Yeah, that is interesting and I think you're right there's gonna have to be a mindset shift of some kind And it's funny when I think I told you the story, offline about advisor group the marketing advisor group for a local technical college and they have technically skilled Graduates coming out there that are welders or truck drivers or whatever and they're making more money Than the marketers the knowledge workers that are coming out and now you know in order to really Blend in these marketers with this new way of thinking, your marketing manufacturing line.

That's going to require a whole new mind shift for those marketers. One of the things that you said was AI often requires not just new tools, but new ways of working. And so what do you see as mindset shifts for marketing teams that they'll AI integration?

Sure. It's really there's a couple of things.

One is the growth mindset, and I think that's pretty well known. Right now, you have to be able to want to try new things. AI is going to deliver new things. It seems every day, right? We've got the 12 days of open AI going on right now, and they're Just blowing my mind every single day so it's that openness and willing to learn new things.

And I have to tell you guy before I leaned all in on AI, I was in that category. I was like, eh, I'm mature in my career. And maybe I don't want to learn something new. Maybe I'm not ready to dive into this. Like I'll use it to write an email, but I don't want to go all in. So I do empathize with that mindset.

So the growth mindset is one thing. I think the other thing is what I call the test and learn mindset. And this is a pretty big shift for marketers because historically marketers have been mired in what I call the battle of opinions, right? Like I think that button should be red. I think that button should be blue, says somebody else.

And we debate that for the hour long meeting. And then eventually somebody decides and the meeting is done. So moving from that type of opinion based or highest paid person based opinion. To one that says, I've got a hypothesis. I'm going to structure a well formed hypothesis with success criteria. And how will I know if it's actually failing?

And I think we're going to have to move to that mindset pretty quickly because we're going to have to program that into. Our autonomous marketing pipelines and so that type of a mindset shift is going to be difficult for some people who've gone through their entire career just being able to browbeat others or, or some people are very charismatic, charismatically charm other people into their opinions.

It's interesting. So we're going to go from the highest paid person's opinion, the hippo down to the lowest paid. Unemployed artificial intelligent person.

It's a great observation, Guy.

Yeah, and they're gonna make the decisions for us I don't know about that, but in any case, it certainly gives a an opinion and may help to sway or Make the conversation a little bit more strategic as opposed to a tactical, let's have a red button or a blue button.

Now, let's really talk about the strategic thing and what we're trying to achieve and then have a I kind of fill in the gaps that, that it can fill in without really spending a lot of time there.

And I'd love I love that observation because what it points to is outcomes and I hate to say it, but marketers have been fairly undisciplined around outcomes.

We're so busy working on the tactical, working on the execution, that it feels like outcomes are a byproduct and it's fate and chance, which has been the criticism of marketing for years is that we don't know what's working well. My hope is with machines, we can say that we, we can really focus on those outcomes, those desired outcomes, and that the machines will help us just iterate until we actually achieve those outcomes that we're desiring.

Yeah, and I think you're right. I think and because the tact the Not the tactical but the execution report of marketing has been so hard and there's been so many And there are like a lot of different opinions as to well. Should it be red or should it be blue? that marketers ended up Focusing on that because they had to get the job out And when in reality, they need to get the job out, but they also then need to see how well did it do?

And because now with AI, hopefully, they're gonna be able to spend less time trying to get the job out and maybe more time looking at how they can really measure and optimize and improve. And so maybe AI will help them to get there. Maybe that's the tool that they need to to make them more outcomes oriented.

Oh, and wouldn't there be happy marketers if we were achieving the outcomes we desired? I love that thought.

Yeah. We are always achieving the outcomes we desire. It just may not be the outcomes that the company needs.

There you go. Yeah,

exactly. Now you've talked about traditional marketing structures and built, being built for assembly lines.

So how do you see marketing organizations evolving structurally to really thrive and improve in an AI powered world?

Yeah. And this actually ties in with the mindset. I nerded out a while ago on management theory and I took a look at the roots of management all the way back to.

lorism, which emerged in like: 1910

They're getting promoted because they know, quote unquote, the one best way of doing things. But with the advent of AI, that gets wiped off the table. And we talked about the flattening of the organization because not only Do we not need work to necessarily go from station to station? The copywriter to the designer to to the reviewer.

But we also don't need so many levels of approval. I think we're still going to need people to monitor the system. We still need people to program the brand guardrails in there and make sure that it isn't Drifting, but that to me looks like a totally different role and hierarchy and organization than what we have today.

Yeah, absolutely. And I could see to your point before there's going to be those people that are going to resist that transition and and they're going to need to figure out how to, do things in a very different way. And certainly as your when your whole career was based on.

On, on doing it one way, and now all of a sudden that's gone, that can be very difficult. So what kind of roles does management play in AI adoption, and what do you see as the key steps marketing leaders need to take to manage this transition?

I think I'd like to talk for a minute about change management especially vis a vis marketing leadership.

I feel in my experience, I was not taught change management formally. as a marketing leader. And I feel like many marketers don't necessarily see it as something that's necessary, especially when I think about the difference between digital marketing and AI. It felt like when digital marketing came on the scene, it was the expansion of marketing.

It was a whole new field that was emerging and marketers could step into. In my heart, I feel like AI is the same, and yet the perception is that the pie is shrinking, that roles are going to go away. Roles will change. And the question is are you ready for the change? Are you as a marketing leader ready for the change?

Are you ready to model a growth mindset? Are you ready to invest in change management? Are you ready to upskill your teams to make your marketing marketers more, more technically literate, more AI literate? And I think it's going to be really hard for leaders and recipients of AI alike. To step into this new future.

Yeah. And I think for the folks that are in the market today that are marketing today and have been doing it for, I don't know, 5, 10, 20 years. There's certainly going to be some challenges for them as they. As they transition and try and figure out a way to survive and thrive and really, improve their whole marketing capabilities.

I think, though, there's some challenges, too, though, in the educational side of things where the universities have to start putting out marketers that are ready to think in this new way where AI is just a piece of how they do their job. Any thoughts on that?

Don't get me started on universities because I have spent a considerable amount of my career working in education and higher education, and we're really shifting to where individuals need skills.

And I don't know that universities teach amazing and wonderful things, right? A lot of critical thinking, a lot of analysis a lot of research. And those are all highly valued. So I am not saying don't, for any listener who's out there, I'm not saying don't go to university. But what I am saying is that the universities themselves need to transform.

And right now I hear them, I hear about things like, We're going to have AI checkers to make sure you're not you're not using AI to write your papers. And to me, that feels, it feels like we're asking the wrong question. Who cares if AI is going to write your paper? Because in the future, it's going to write your paper.

Now, the question is. How do you evaluate an AI written paper? How do you make sure that it's sourcing things correctly? How do you know when it's hallucinating? I don't, I feel like I've drifted from answering your question, which is so interesting because even humans drift, right? We criticize AI for drifting, but we as humans do it all the time.

No, but you bring up some really interesting points. And I think AI, especially in marketing or knowledge working I was I also teach over at at Emory as a guest lecturer and the professor there said, If I receive a paper that is not grammatically correct with all of the spelling mistakes removed I'm going to just turn it back to you and have you redo it And the reason why he said that is if you're not using ai to write your paper You can't come up with one that has you know All of the grammar fixed and all of the spelling fixed and especially if you're you know, we're english is a you know your second language and and then You're ending up, to your point, ending up really providing something better.

Now what you did bring up though, which I think is really good, is is getting the sourcing of your of your data or of the work that you did to make sure that AI actually, used valid sources and didn't just hallucinate. So there's and that problem now can be in, in marketing.

In, in marketing education as well as in marketing, for the rest of us, so to speak. Yeah, I really appreciate that. That's pretty good. Now there are people in organizations that are struggling and resisting AI adoption. Where do you see that happening and what advice would you give organizations?

To resist that and overcome that.

Yeah it's interesting. I came back from a conference recently, and it was targeting B2B marketers. And there were a lot of content creators there, people who wrote emails and blog posts. And things like that. And when I was asking them about AI, they, I just felt the self preservation, right?

I felt oh AI is not going to be able to take my job because, we need the human empathy and we need the this. And, they were like I put stuff into AI and it delivered crap. And I really wanted to ask can I see your prompt? Because I can get AI to write.

pretty good things with a with an advanced prompt. So I don't know that A. I won't be able to write like you do in the near future. So there is this element of self preservation going on. And this is where I feel like some of these formal change management Frameworks. And if your listeners are like, Oh what are those things?

Add car is a good one. That's by pro side. John Cotter has a formal change management framework, but the gist of these frameworks are you've got to get proactive. In stating your organization stance. So you've got to anticipate that your resistors what they're concerned about their families.

They're concerned about putting their kids through college. Tell them what your stance is. Our stance is. We're looking to get proactive with AI. We expect productivity gains. We expect roles to change. And we're going to upskill you. That is a very clear message. Even with that, you're going to have resistors.

So you go from that global message. Down into maybe a team message. This is how it's going to impact our team. Here's our stance as a team. Here's what we're hoping to do with AI. Down to the individual. If you've got an individual resistor. Okay, let's talk about how it's impacting you. Let's talk about how it's impacting Your role in your life and if they continue to resist Despite your best efforts to get them on board That's when you're dealing with individuals and you may have to make a tough call around whether that individual stays or goes

Yeah, that, and those are always tough calls and yeah, really tough.

So what is the one key takeaway you'd like the listeners to remember about managing organizational change as it relates to AI and integrating AI into marketing?

s and rightfully there's over: 3000

What I'd like people to hear is that it's going to be more than just the tools that there's people issues There's process issues that need to be addressed and I'd like to invite marketers To start to get ahead of that and start thinking in those lines

Yeah, absolutely. And you know that Theme kind of comes up quite a bit where you have, the AI and then you have the human And it is about both of those and and it's and it is about then making the combination of both of those to be More than just one plus one equals two.

Definitely very good do you have any really interesting like an interesting case study you could highlight as we're thinking about this change management and an AI integration into marketing

Yeah, so this is a story about Accenture and of course, Accenture, big consulting firm, and they are trying to get ahead of integrating AI into marketing.

They paired with Nvidia to try and crack this nut. And a few key takeaways from that story is that they originally tried this approach of just giving all AI tools to as many people as possible. At the same time as they could, but it created this sense of anxiety amongst everybody who was given these tools because there were people who use them.

And then there were people who didn't. And the people who didn't were feeling the pressure to do it. And so What they discovered, which I think points directly to what we've been talking about, is if you ask anyone to work in a fundamentally different way, there's almost always going to be rejection, right?

And they said, and this is a quote, The most important part of any organization is the ability to change the entire operating So we changed the way our processes flowed to make it so that the organ rejection wouldn't happen. And I thought that was really powerful in what they were able to do is then they were able to move from just dinking around with tools to implementing more than a dozen agents who helped cut the total number of steps.

So again, we're thinking about workflow here. We're thinking about processes from an average of 135 steps down to 85 steps. So I thought that was just a really powerful testimony of what you can do with AI and the hidden gotchas that happen along the way.

Wow, that's yeah, that's a pretty big savings, if you can get 10 percent or 5%, you're usually successful and you're talking about almost whatever it was 30, 30 or 40%.

And and that is a that's a big deal. That's a really big deal. So it was a

powerful story.

Yeah, very good. Thank you for that. I appreciate it. One last question before we close. So what would you, what kind of advice would you give an upcoming new marketer on how they can succeed and thrive in this new marketing world, so to speak?

Yeah, I'd say lean in, everything. I did chat with some some college students who were pretty frustrated the other day, they they were spending, of course, tens of thousands of dollars a year on their education only to feel like it was going to be obsolete when when they got out.

And to them, I would say, keep the faith because, There needs to be a person who oversees the technology. The technology is in, is the engine of the car. You need a driver for that car. So let's just take a look at that scenario I was talking about. That automated, that autonomous marketing pipeline.

Somebody needs to program in the brand guidelines. Okay if you need somebody to set the parameters for the brand guidelines, that means you need somebody who understands what it means to have brand guidelines. The same thing. If you're going to have a machine write your content, you need somebody who really understands what good marketing content looks like, and what poor marketing content looks like.

Again, keep the faith. Everything you're learning is valid. Lean into AI. As much as you can. It is the future. And yeah, that's, those are my thoughts for anybody new to marketing.

Yeah. Fantastic. Makes a lot of sense. And I think you're so right. It's and I think they will have a challenge but getting into the market and breaking in, but I think, though if they have really matured as in, through their education in the use of AI and being very, very very strong in their use of it, I think they're going to have no trouble at all fitting right in.

Melissa, thank you so much. This has been really very interesting. Can they can you tell us where folks can learn more about you and more about Marketing Frontier? And where can they go to just learn more about you and your company?

Yeah, I appreciate that guy. So marketing frontier dot AI.

We've got such great resources there. Marketing AI radio is our podcast. We've got a free five day identifying your high impact use cases course. And of course, our blog that we're continually releasing interesting articles and thoughts. So thank you so much for having me on the show. What a great conversation.

I'd love to be a have a conversation with you anytime. Really appreciate it.

Absolutely. Thank you. And really very interesting. You really bring up the it's not only using now AI and marketing, but how do you make the organizational changes to really take advantage of that? And your example of what Accenture did and just generally, it makes a whole lot of sense.

So thank you for that. And really appreciating having you on again for the listeners. It was marketing frontier. ai, marketing frontier. ai. Please reach out to Melissa and see if you see if she can help you out. It sure sounds like she can. Otherwise, for the my audience, please stay tuned for many other series in this in the series of Backstory on Marketing and AI, and if you'd like to learn more about some of my books, please visit marketingmachine.

prorelevant. com, and sign up for more episodes, download what you'd like, and really appreciate it, Melissa. It was great to talk to you and learn more about what you're doing at Marketing Frontier. Thanks so much, Guy. Thank you.