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Hey crafters. Just a reminder, this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only and should not be considered advice.

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The views and opinions expressed our own and do not represent those of any company or business we currently work with are associated with, or have worked with in the past.

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Thanks for tuning in to the future craft marketing podcast.

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Let's get it started. Hey there.

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Welcome to the Future Craft Marketing Podcast, where we're exploring how AI is changing all things from brand to demand.

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I'm Ken Roden, one of your guides on this exciting new journey.

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And I'm Erin Mills, your other co host, and together we're here to unpack the future of AI and marketing.

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We'll share some insights, test the latest technology, interview industry pioneers, and talk to folks doing really cool things.

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So Ken, tell me a really cool thing you've been doing with AI.

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Well, Erin, I continue to find use cases for AI throughout my life, so I am getting ready to go away.

1:06

On vacation, and I needed some help understanding what outfits match because I don't have a, I for fashion at all.

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And so I started with a shirt and I said to ChatGPT, I have these other items, what would go well with it? And it said, Oh, it would go well with one of these two things.

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And then I combined it with that, took a picture of it again.

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Uploaded it. And I was like, this is a perfect match.

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And then it was like, it would be complimented by a pair of khaki shorts.

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And so now I'm using it to help me dress myself. It's, it saves me time and makes me confident in my decisions.

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That's incredible. Have you taken it out into the world and used one of these outfits? I am wearing the shirt right now that I did ask it about.

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And it said this shirt matched my.

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I don't know what to call it, my palette, if you will.

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So I've been doing that, but I will let you know how this goes when I take this out into the wilderness and if people stare at me cause my clothes clash or something, What about you? What cool things are you doing with it? Well, I've been working on our episodes as you and I are new to podcasting.

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We have been testing out a lot of tech.

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We'll also talk about this a little bit later in the tech review, but have been doing a ton of stuff in Descript.

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And so one of the things that is really great is I've been testing a lot the AI functionality Whether it's cutting out the ahs and ums, which apparently you and I do a lot of, I don't agree.

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it's been really interesting to see how much faster the editing process goes.

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As opposed to our first episode where I really didn't leverage the AI tools.

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I did try one piece of AI.

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I'll talk about a little bit later. Did not work out real well.

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But Descript has a little bit of work to do on that piece, but until later.

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Who are we talking to today? Erin, I know sometimes you're really excited to talk to our guests.

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Our guest today, I am nerding out talking to Karrie Sanderson, who's the founder of KES consulting.

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She is a brand marketing expert and I've been following her for a little while now, and I just love how she really thinks about how AI is going to impact brand beyond logos or taglines, but actually like the human element and the perception of.

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You're branded the market in this world of AI.

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I think it's going to be a great interview. Yeah, I can't wait.

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She's got a really good customer centric way she goes about the things that she's doing.

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After this, we'll get into that interview.

3:41

All right. And we're back. Really excited for today's guest, Karrie Sanderson.

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Karrie Sanderson is a visionary marketing leader known for driving growth and innovation across industries, including SAS, health care, consumer products, and more.

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Her superpower is leveraging customer and marketing insights for effective strategy, brand and market development, and driving overall growth.

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She leverages various AI technologies and strategies to unlock added potential in these core areas.

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Karrie recently founded KES Consulting and is providing go to market guidance for clients from tech startups to the Fortune 500.

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After leading the brand efforts as companies such as Coca Cola and Starbucks Karrie moved into SAS and was most recently CMO at Typeform and VP of Marketing at Smartsheet.

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Karrie, really excited to hear from you today. Thank you so much for joining us.

4:33

Hi, Erin. Thank you so much. Karrie, I am so excited to have you here.

4:36

Brand is one of my favorite topics to cover in marketing.

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To kick us off, can you share how.

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AI is currently reshaping marketing specifically in the brand arena.

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Yeah. I think the first thing is, brand is a word that people can attach a lot of different definitions to.

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So my definition of brand is it's about your reputation.

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It's about your credibility as a company.

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It's more than just logos and style guides and messaging frameworks, right? It's more than that.

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Understanding that frame that I have is really important to how I talk about AI and brand.

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I think the most important thing is in marketing in general, AI is coming.

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It's here whether you want it or not. It's already been embedded in many of the tools that we've used.

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It's now that we have the keys and as marketers, we can decide how we want to do it versus how whatever tool we're using is doing it.

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I think it should be used all the way from the leadership and marketing to understand what's happening in markets.

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You can leverage AI for research to understand where you should be focusing from a go to market perspective, all the way to the most junior people in your organization who can use it to vet ideas, AB test headlines, draft some content that they can then take and shape their own.

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It's really limitless. But I think it needs to be used across the entire marketing team in order to be effective.

5:55

I think it's really interesting thinking about how AI can impact every part of the organization and also how the brand positioning actually impacts every part of the organization.

6:05

So I love what you said there and you've mentioned the importance of customer research in shaping brand messages.

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How do you think AI can enhance the process to provide deeper insights for better brand positioning? Yeah, this is one of my favorite use cases for ai, for marketing, because I'm an engineer by education, so I'm very data driven and insight driven in how I approach brand and marketing.

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And a lot of what we used to take either a lot of time and a lot of manual research and took a human bias into it, if you will, of, collecting market insights, collecting, feedback, looking through all the reviews that maybe somebody posted.

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Now you can take all of that pretty quickly, consolidate it, and then put it into.

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Whatever AI tool you're using and ask it to summarize the insights for you and understand at levels that either took a lot of legwork to do or simply weren't possible.

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So starting from there, leveraging AI as a research assistant and a way to get that market insight, I think is the first piece.

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Of the puzzle and, you can use your online reviews, G2, Trust Radius.

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You can look at your community of people on your website as well and see what they're saying just to get sentiment.

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So there's a lot of really good ways to use it. Yeah, I think the other thing that's really interesting is around just the fear about you get all these insights, but then you start to create things and it feels really impersonal.

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how do we as marketers, strike a balance between leveraging AI for efficiency, but really maintaining an authentic human tone? to me, the way that I leverage AI is.

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first of all, you have to think about consistency, and especially if you're in a fast moving tech environment.

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Everybody's creating things really quick. You want to get out there.

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You want to respond. It's super easy to lose track of the brand, right? Even if you try to put it out there and communicate it.

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AI tools allow you to inject, incorporate, here's our brand voice.

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Here's our brand tone. Here's our key messages. Here's insights about the audience.

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So that as you're developing content, it's a lot easier to stay on brand.

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So I think that's the first piece that's really important.

8:04

I stay authentic is if your brand positioning and your go to market messaging, and you really understand your customer is strong.

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Then you are more likely to have messages that resonate.

8:13

That's the first piece, the second piece. Anyone who knows me knows that I type books all the time.

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It's so easy to get caught up in the features and the benefits, but humans by nature are emotional decision makers 95 percent of decisions are made emotionally and then we justify them later rationally.

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a way to keep your authenticity is to make sure that you're Injecting some emotion into what you're putting out in the market, But when you use customers language, when you tell stories that resonate with them, you create an emotional reaction that is, and feels authentic.

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And that makes your brand stand out. You mentioned fear and emotion, right? And I think about a time in the last year where I worked with a team trying to get them to use AI.

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And it was a marketing team who did content, demand gen, and product marketing, And I said, go out there and just explore.

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See what's possible. And Regroup to collect everyone's findings.

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I was fascinated because all of them were like, it's going to take creativity from marketing.

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Marketing is going to become boring or like it's all over.

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And they were afraid that this was going to take the fun out of marketing and what makes it so human.

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So I'm curious, Karrie, what are some best practices for keeping, the human aspects of marketing, like creativity and, judgment.

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And how do you link that up with, the analytical capabilities of AI? What I look for is using AI for the repeatable sort of the tasks that no one wants to do anyway, and using it in your processes, in your systems, look for things, whether you're a content leader or.

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PMM, what are those routines that you could leverage AI to free up some of your time, get them going on the processes and tasks and automation that way, that frees up your time.

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So you can be more creative and you can spend more time on deep thinking.

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It's always hard for each of us to carve out time on our calendar.

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how do you get more of that? I would start there. even if you use AI tools for creating content, and keeping the human in the loop, you hear that a lot right now.

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You still need as a human to put your experience, your judgment, your final understanding of is this going to resonate or not on it.

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So there's a lot of opportunity to be creative in how you apply AI, how you use it to free up time so you can be more creative.

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And I think it actually has a potential to allow more creativity than less, but it will be a shift.

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It will be an adjustment of how we work. I think that it's this competitive element to the every company right now is thinking about how do I get ahead with AI? How do I move faster? it's often a crowded market.

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And, a lot of the competitors out there are saying a lot of the same things.

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Curious how you think about AI tools and techniques and differentiating yourself from the competition.

10:52

I think the first thing is you, same as I mentioned at the beginning of our discussion around how you should use AI for understanding your own market, your own customers, your own product offering and how that's resonating.

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You can do the same thing with your competitors, right? So you can still leverage AI to understand like where are there similarities, where are there parts of the landscape that maybe nobody's talking about or addressing.

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there are tools out there now that you can literally put better websites in your own websites.

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It's incredible where that shortcuts.

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Just the foundational understanding of what's going on to differentiate risk competitors.

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I think it's still the same thing. The first piece is how is your product market fit, right? it's going to force everybody to be a lot more honest with themselves about the product market fit of what you do have.

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And are you really offering something to customers that is.

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Meeting a need or a pain that they have, or they have, they don't realize.

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And then secondarily, what's ownable by you, where are those differences versus your competitors? So it's the same marketing principles that we've always been using.

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I think AI just allows us to get at those insights more quickly and a little bit more objective way.

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So to me, that's how I would approach it is get the foundations, look for those opportunities and then lean in as much as you can on in an authentic way and a consistent way with what's different and unique about what you have in the market.

12:08

Yeah. It almost feels once you ran the foundation, AI even makes it more of a gap between you and your competition if you can really find product market fit.

12:17

It really is. I think the other thing too is super interesting and I'll be interested to see where the landscape goes because the digital world, it's going to be so much easier to uplevel, create, be more consistent, lead the market, which I think we're seeing in some cases of content that it.

12:32

almost becomes overwhelming. And I wonder at what point will consumers say enough and start craving either very differentiated experiences, in person experiences not to say that our events should just be all the kinds of things we've always done, but we have little micro meetings, micro events.

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I think it's going to challenge us as marketers and then go to market in general to think differently about how we create these experiences.

12:55

Engagements with customers outside the digital world, because I think the digital world as everyone gets up to speed on AI and content creation, like the bar will be raised.

13:04

And people will start to maybe feel a little bit overwhelmed and crave something different.

13:09

That's spot on. I think that's what consumers and buyers are going to be looking for.

13:13

It's crazy to me, the number of LinkedIn comments that you see now that are just, you can tell are generated by And people are, no, no shame to your game, but it's not connecting with your buyers.

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And so that's going to impact trust.

13:27

One of the things that I really appreciate about the work that you do specifically is around how brand is about connecting with the customer.

13:36

How can brands maintain that transparency and build that trust with their customers? When all of this is happening and how can we prevent the risk of, having bias in our AI systems? I think that's a two part question.

13:50

Yeah, the first one, yeah, the bias one, I'll hold that one for a second.

13:53

I've always felt the biggest gift we have as marketers is the feedback that we get from our customers.

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And in some ways it's the feedback we get from people who chose not to be our customers even more valuable.

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When I started marketing, digital marketing was in its infancy.

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And so the marketing world was create the thing, put it out there, wait a few months for, to see if it worked, right? So there's a blessing and a curse of that immediate feedback.

14:17

When you have this opportunity, though, and I think customers now expect to be able to give you feedback immediately on your social channels through chatbots, whatever those things may be, if you treat that as a gift, as a rich resource for understanding what's still not working for your customers where there may be gaps, where the things that you should absolutely amplify and lean in on, what are the things that they really love about you.

14:38

there's so much information there, whether it's from a gone call or the chat bot or social feedback and DMs.

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the whole company should treat that as gold, because it's really the place where those rich insights.

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And as a marketer, I always really want to understand exactly the language the customers are using when they give you that feedback.

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Because when you take their words, as opposed to putting into all kinds of jargon that we feel like we need to do, you take their words and play them back to them.

15:04

They feel heard. They feel validated in their decision to choose you or to even consider you.

15:10

So I think that as marketers it'll be super tempting to replace that customer voice with whatever comes out of an AI tool that we're using.

15:18

I think you should make sure you're capturing that customer voice and feeding that into the AI tool and making sure that it's consolidating it for you so that you can use it back.

15:28

Unbiased, second move. I think the most important thing is being aware that it exists and understanding educating your team on looking for implicit bias things that.

15:40

May come through in terms of personal bias, right? Gender, race, ethnicity sexual orientation, religion that may be coming through.

15:49

That I think we think of as human bias, but also be careful about bias amongst, markets, So there's a lot of places where if you don't have an AI council yet at your company, you need to get one, establish one.

16:01

There's a lot of good resources out there now where you can find it.

16:03

I'm looking through any of the providers have that as a part of your AI council, you should have some tenants that are.

16:11

Put out to the rest of the organization on how to address bias and look for it and being aware of it is the first piece of addressing it.

16:17

I think the most important thing is the, there's some bias that you want to create in the system.

16:20

I don't know if I'd call it bias, but if you're using an AI tool that is helping you write content, You're of course going to want to put your tone of voice, your brand guidelines, your key messaging.

16:28

You're going to want to put all the things in there.

16:30

So that's important. But you could also put some other guardrails around balanced use of gender pronouns or things like that, that can help.

16:40

But it really is, again, this is the human in the loop. you should not be publishing things that haven't been reviewed by a human.

16:45

AI is not. ready for that yet. It's important to still take a look at it.

16:49

Somebody who's thinking about it individually in those pieces that are created, but also cohesively and comprehensively across your content.

16:55

Yeah, I think that's a really interesting point.

16:58

switching gears a little bit to PR, but brand influences PR so much.

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And also we're in this 24 hours news cycle where brand really matters.

17:06

How do you think about AI to leverage and optimize media outreach and also find the right influencers? Cause there's a lot of risk around.

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Somebody says the wrong thing, or, represents something else.

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And that can be really challenging for a brand, and also to really cut through the noise.

17:23

Yeah, that's one area where I feel like I'd be hesitant to use AI for PR at this point because I think that's an art still that is around quickly reading the room.

17:34

You can use it for things like what topics oversaturated right now, or what's becoming hot to think about how you're pitching what you want to put out there in the world, what you want to get picked up from an earned media perspective.

17:45

But for me Influencer perspective, I'm always really cautious because Any influencer or sponsorship or anything that you tie to your brand, should make sense, right? People should say, I understand why that makes sense to me why they would do it.

17:58

Whether that's an emotional connection or expertise connection, but as soon as you do that, you need to be ready for the, what if scenarios, what if, There's a scandal.

18:08

What if something happens to that person? So anytime you add in any type of influencer into your PR thought leadership strategy, you have to also add another dimension of being prepared for crisis comms, responsive comms, for all the different scenarios that can go wrong.

18:23

So it's easy to say let's get an influencer, but there's a lot more that has to go into it.

18:27

that really sparks the importance of brand protection Especially in the era of AI, what are some key strategies that companies should adopt to safeguard their brand reputation? That's a great question.

18:39

It's something that's on my mind and also on my clients minds for sure is crisis preparedness and the kind of crises that we've been prepared for in the past, especially if you're in tech, is the app go down or the website go down or something happened, maybe a senior leader passes away or something really unfortunate like that.

18:57

The level of things you need to be prepared for now which is the brand PR, crossover, if you will, is a deep fake.

19:05

If somebody deep fakes your CEO saying something that they wouldn't ever say, Are you ready? So I think there needs to be some scenario planning, some, what if, planning scenarios that the team should do just enough to get okay, we're 60 percent ready with a response, get something drafted so that you, and a communication plan internally.

19:23

Who is authorized to speak about this issue, make sure all of that's in place so that not if, but when something like that happens, you're a little bit more prepared.

19:34

The other good news is if you've been showing up authentically as a brand, if you've been building an emotional connection, And something that tangential to your brand shows up, it's a lot easier for people to believe you when you say, that wasn't us.

19:45

But if your brand's all over the place, you haven't been paying attention to it, you haven't been cultivating it in a consistent voice tone, it's a lot harder to explain to people that whatever that thing was that someone created for you via AI.

19:58

is not real. it's a problem but as I think it's an added dimension to PR and thought leadership, brand leaders that, didn't exist maybe even a year ago.

20:06

that's great advice. I feel like we're just finally getting to the point where we're used to fishing and we know how to spot some of those, but deep fakes just take it to another level.

20:16

Yes. Some of the things I've seen where, it's give us 15 second video clip and, a little bit more and you can, Text type and it'll create videos of anything.

20:24

They're a little bit easy to spot if you're looking for them, but it's super easy for someone who isn't paying that close attention to see it, share it.

20:32

And before you know it, you have an issue. So being ready for that kind of thing with a response plan and some is really important.

20:38

It's interesting because you have brands.

20:41

That maybe need to flesh out their perspective a little bit more so that their customers and their audiences know when there's deep fakes.

20:50

They say, wait a minute, that's not how they actually talk or they don't feel that way.

20:54

So it's almost more important for you to have a strong brand perspective and have people understand what you're about so that they don't fall trap to it.

21:02

I'm actually surprised we haven't seen more of this at this point.

21:05

I'm seeing a few more places on those scenarios.

21:07

I always think, if that happened to a company, what would they do? I think you can bring up a really good point, Ken, though, is it's not just your customers, but your employees.

21:15

So educating your employees about if they see something that they think is, wait, this doesn't sound like something we would do.

21:22

how can they report it? How can they flag it? What's the process? So educating your employees, a little bit of, if you see something, say something so that you can get ahead of it as well, because they're all eyes and ears for you in the marketplace as well.

21:34

Not just what your PR agency may be tracking or your sentiment trackers may find.

21:38

Yeah, what are maybe one or two other recommendations you would give to an organization to help prepare them for deepfakes? I think just making sure that the leadership is most likely it'll be a leadership person if they try to do that, that they understand how to react and how not to react to let it be handled by the PR crisis team versus that maybe there'll be an initial temptation to respond.

22:02

Giving a really good media training to it's more proactive.

22:06

It's not so AI deep fake, but if you have really good media training for your leadership team but in speaking on your behalf, there's less likely for them to create something that can create a viral moment, be messed with a little bit of AI and then run from there.

22:18

I think just proactively making sure that your leadership team understands what's happening.

22:23

Speaking of being proactive I want to shift to.

22:26

Organizations that are coming out, all these companies who are AI companies or all these companies who are launching and releasing AI products, how can these companies build trust and educate their customers about AI, the ethics of AI, how to, properly use it in a responsible way.

22:49

Yeah, I think, there's so much innovation happening right now, things that people get a spark and realize that, maybe this solution wasn't possible before AI, and it is now, and they get excited and they want to build that.

23:00

What I'm seeing is a lot of skepticism, especially at the enterprise level around bringing on new tools, what are the risks? How will it play well with others? How do I operationalize this? What's onboarding look like? How does it play well with my other tools? Like it's very similar before.

23:14

I think with AI, there's extra hurdles around how is my data being used? Is with whatever I'm doing internally being used to train your tool and then someone else will get ahold of it.

23:24

What's the data protection look like? So things that I'm sure will be caught if you're a large enterprise will be caught in, the contract process and the MSA process, but for small to midsize businesses, the companies that have these AI tools, the more proactively they can talk about the operations, the data security, the data safety of whatever they're building and then how It plays well with the rest of your tech stack.

23:47

So it's not just the underlying benefit of what you built.

23:50

It's the how you get there and how you can give people the assurances that, that there won't be some unintended consequence down the road from using your product.

23:58

I think about all of these AI tools that are coming out with free trials, or you can upload your first video for free and I'm like, what are you doing with that data? It's almost like filling out a lead gen form 10 years ago where you were like, I'm filling out this form, but I didn't know that you were going to sell it, my phone number to 400 agencies who are just going to spam robot call me and what are you going to do with that video or what are you going to do with the insights you get from that video? Yeah.

24:24

Proceed with caution. I'm, I pretty much won't try any new AI tool unless I've heard about it from a trusted source.

24:30

there's so many out there. It's hard to sort through. So some of the, places that I go for my insights and learning about new tools and once let them do it for me and then understand I belong to some CMO networks, some AI communities.

24:42

Where it feels a little bit safer to ask questions and try.

24:46

So for your listeners, I would say start following and find some, trusted sources.

24:51

Ask your professional communities that you're in for recommendations and be, just be really careful about what you sign up for and what you try without really reading the fine print and knowing what you might be giving away or what the privacy is.

25:05

It's so tempting. there's just so much innovation happening.

25:08

It's just insane right now. It's exciting.

25:10

It's exciting. It's things kind of change and shape things in ways that we haven't thought about.

25:15

I do think that there's a happy medium between just jumping in with both feet without thinking through what the downstream consequences might be.

25:25

But I think those that are in the wait and see mode right now that time has passed, you should be adopting, starting your AI council.

25:31

Even if you're at a small company, have a conversation.

25:34

Make sure you have guardrails. Can I use this for personal use or not? What version am I using? how are we going to use it? How aren't we? Just having those conversations will give people some guardrails and protect your company and your brand along the way.

25:46

Yeah, I think that's interesting. Coming back to PR and the crisis situation.

25:51

what role do you think AI can play, whether it's the real time monitoring or rapid response? Where do you think AI could fit in today? Yeah, PR is such an art, right? And, it's relationship driven.

26:03

when you're looking to hire a PR person, you're looking for somebody that always has a lot of contacts with whatever industry publications that you're looking to get to.

26:10

I think to me again, going back to my foundational insight is how can I use AI to tap into, emerging trends, topics that people think are going to come up that I can, reasonably bring my brand into that conversation.

26:24

And use that to help me understand where I should be pitching, what I should be pitching, where things saturated.

26:30

We don't need another, I think back to the days of early COVID, how do we adapt through COVID? At some point it was like, we don't need another top 10 list of how to do this.

26:38

I think AI can be used really well. In the proactive side when you're pitching and then of course in scanning the digital universe for what your mentions are and how it's working.

26:48

You said something earlier that really stuck with me about People who are using AI already really need to start doing it.

26:56

And it reminded me a couple of weeks ago, I was at a conference and I asked the audience how many of you have used AI? And of course, everyone raised their hand, right? And I said, how many of you are using AI weekly? And a lot of hands dropped.

27:10

And then I said daily, and it was maybe like four or five people.

27:15

And I was shocked. Just in my day to day, I use AI to help me answer questions really quickly because it's better than Google right now, and I think we're seeing that it's not actually being adopted at the rate we think it is, we're all into the topic, right? And for marketing teams, especially in the enterprise, who are maybe not adopting AI at the rate that we think they should, What advice would you give to them, to the marketers, the marketing leadership to deal with internal resistance? Maybe they don't have the direction.

27:46

They don't have an AI strategy and really address that skills gap that's growing really quick.

27:51

I think the first thing is if you are listening to this and your company hasn't been talking about it, you drive it.

27:58

You make it happen. Do some research, understand what's out there, raise your hand and say, I'd like to take this on.

28:03

Because I guarantee you that if you don't have a council, somebody's still using it at your company and it's probably putting you at risk if they're putting in company data or not using it properly.

28:11

The second thing is you just have to try it, right? So I think if you're in an enterprise, it's a little bit harder because there are rules, especially around data security.

28:18

So are you on an enterprise version or a version where they've committed to not use your data to train the model? And then sit down and just do lunch and learns.

28:27

Let's do some use cases. Let's try it out. Let's share.

28:30

So whether you're the, marketing leader and you haven't done that yet take a person who is really smart and loves to figure things out, take some of their stuff off their plate and give it to them to run with, have them do it.

28:40

But if you do, you haven't seen usage adoption yet, figure out ways to build into their routine, lunch and learns, best practices, sharing, let's all tackle this one use case together.

28:50

Is frankly, I think it's going to become.

28:52

A selling point for recruiting.

28:55

If you are, depending upon where you're in your career, if you're looking to join an organization and they are way behind on ai, do you wanna really join that organization? Or do you want to go somewhere where you're learning the skills of the future? Employee engagement, retention, attraction, I think AI and the way that companies use it are going to start to be a differentiator in an employee brand.

29:15

Yeah, it's almost like on a job description where they say you get a choice between a PC or Mac, it is something to consider it could be a differentiator for you to recruit top talent.

29:24

And retain talent is they feel like they're being left behind because companies, dragging their feet.

29:30

It could be a reason for someone to leave and look for a job somewhere else where they can build that skill set.

29:34

That's such a great point. Do you think we're going to start seeing in the job descriptions themselves, more of a requirement for AI? I know I'm thinking about it from a marketing lens and, marketers that come on my team I would like them to, be experimenting Yeah, I think that will absolutely happen.

29:50

We understand like how do you use it in your day to day? How are more effective, more efficient? Give me an example of when you used it to tackle a problem that was previously unsolvable What tools do you use, or would you use if you had the opportunity to just get a little bit of AI literacy gauge on people I could see that becoming a part of job descriptions or for sure a part of an interview process.

30:11

It's a question that I would absolutely ask. Yeah, especially right now, I would deem it as a qualification of are you curious, right? And that curiosity to me is one of the most important skills a marketer has to have.

30:24

I think people should at least be curious. I would love to know who are you following and, what have you tried? And I think that curiosity is important.

30:32

It should be a tool that we use.

30:35

To drive our business and drive customer satisfaction.

30:39

It shouldn't be AI forward.

30:41

It should be customer journey, customer focused forward.

30:44

How can AI enable that? I think that's the flip that needs to happen.

30:48

A little bit more like when we all got PCs or, the novelty was the tool itself, I think when that starts to wear off and it's like, how do you use it? To continue to drive things forward, that will be a nice turning point.

31:00

remember how they had solitaire to teach people how to use a mouse? To line sweeper, like I know enough to remember all that.

31:09

And it's almost a similar thing, especially with the launch of four o.

31:13

no barrier to entry there You don't even have to put you don't have to pay the 20 bucks, Are there other emerging trends or technologies that you think are really going to revolutionize brand marketing? Yeah, From a brand perspective, companies I've worked at before, onboarding and how to, or how do I make a dashboard or how do I build a form or all those things.

31:32

You have to go and record a video, a how to video.

31:37

Maybe there's some in app help as well, which is amazing. I think about some of these technologies as a brand.

31:43

How do you get people to that first aha moment where they really get the value that you're bringing.

31:49

So how do you embed it in the product to bring people on the journey to get them to success more quickly? Those are all brand moments because they feel instead of frustrating, which is takes away from your brand, reputation and credibility to supportive and helpful.

32:04

I look forward to seeing how AI and those types of tools can inspire people to think really just out of the box, like not how can it make another demo video? Maybe I don't need demo videos anymore.

32:15

Maybe I have a way to embed this in my product and the video will say, what are you trying to do? I'm trying to make this.

32:19

Oh, what if you do that? It's right there versus the back and forth.

32:23

from a brand perspective, all of those are emotional connection moments with your product.

32:28

with your help desk with, customer service, that AI can take care of those moments so that you can focus more on the human part that needs to be done.

32:39

I've gotta believe those UX folks are thinking about this too and how they leverage it.

32:43

Because the product and the website are the two biggest brand assets you have, right? If your product over delivers, it adds to your brand.

32:49

So the relationship I have with the product team is always priority for me, before I came to tech, when you work in CPG, I was a brand leader.

32:57

I owned the product and the brand and the PNL.

33:00

I think that's right. Like talking and connecting with your internal counterparts on what does the journey feel like? How do you keep them, attached and, connected? Building upon the trust that you're building and having great experiences from the, when they hit purchase through, being a customer for years, how do you build that? And I think AI's gonna have amazing impacts all along that journey.

33:21

Yeah, because. The way that I solve technical problems, like one of the software we're using to make this podcast, I've been struggling with I use ChatGPT to help me QA it right.

33:34

And tests why isn't working? And I tried this and what about this? But if I'm a brand I would want you to do that.

33:40

In my help section, and I provide the solution to you.

33:44

And so I think this is going to be an interesting like challenge for these vendors that, think they want people to go to their community or their help center.

33:53

And I'm using chat GPT because it's so fast and it's right there.

33:56

And that plays out. That's actually a really good point.

33:59

How will communities evolve, right? There's a lot of brands out there that have very well established, highly visited, large communities.

34:06

How will that evolve as people can get, because they start off usually as like, how can we help each other? Has anybody ever done this before? What's the formula for that? But how will those evolve? I think that's still an open question.

34:18

Karrie, this has been an awesome interview, but I just have one set of questions left for you.

34:24

Here at FutureCraft Marketing, we are all about the practical tips and tricks for our listeners.

34:28

So I'm going to give you four questions and I want your quick hit answers.

34:32

Your best quick AI tip.

34:35

Perplexity. I really don't use Google anymore.

34:38

Perplexity is my go to for research and understanding when you want to go find something.

34:42

And then I pit the others against themselves.

34:45

So Chad, GPT, Claude, Gemini.

34:48

I started using Meta just to see what it looks like.

34:50

So I have those tabs open at all times. And I use them more for summarizing, start playing.

34:56

You have to start using it. And it doesn't have to be, the other day I was like, I don't know what I want to make for dinner.

35:01

I got this in my fridge. I took a picture on my phone.

35:03

I have all the apps on my phone, gave me recipes.

35:06

Perfect. It doesn't have to be work related. The more you create that muscle memory, the better.

35:10

All right. I love it. Perplexity AI is incredible.

35:13

Next one. What is your best prompt, workflow, or GPT that you'd recommend to our listeners? My best workflow is probably more what we talked about at the beginning of the podcast is what I'm trying to understand and research.

35:29

I go out and find everything I can either direct link it in or PDF it, and then use GPT to summarize for me what are the insights? What did you find? I use it for summarizing research all the time.

35:41

What is your best tip for keeping up with all of the news around AI and marketing? I subscribe to several different newsletters and follow a set of people on LinkedIn.

35:55

my learning journey with AI began with the Marketing AI Institute and Paul Retzer, Kathy McPhillips, Mike, but that team.

36:03

And really was, is a great place for anyone who's getting started to begin.

36:08

And then the last one is what technology should our listeners check out that they may not know about? I think they probably know about it.

36:15

Unless you're an expert user of the basics already, I would just stick with Plexity and the top four tools to just play with AI.

36:24

I think if you get those down, any other tool that comes along, you'll be able to use.

36:29

maybe this is a tip. I asked it to write the prompt for me.

36:32

So it's a weird like recursive tool where you can say, I need to write a prompt that helps me figure this out.

36:39

Will you write one for me? Then it writes the prompt.

36:41

Then I try to run and use that. So you don't have to be a prompt writer.

36:45

You just have to know what you want to do and ask it to write the prompt.

36:47

I used to try to write the prompt and make it perfect.

36:49

I'm like, I don't do that anymore.

36:51

Karrie, thank you so much for joining us.

36:54

I learned a lot and we covered brand and then the crisis communication stuff.

36:59

think I'll be thinking about that for a while. It's coming.

37:02

Thank you, Ken. And thank you, Erin. I really appreciate you having me on the show.

37:06

Anytime. You're welcome back anytime.

37:08

This was really great, especially thinking about those deep fakes that now I'm going to be up at night.

37:13

yeah, and it's true for your family also.

37:16

And then also I'll give my plug for this. If you and your family do not have a safe password or a password yet that only you know, should there be a deepfake call about somebody stranded on the side of the road or something like that, make sure you do that.

37:28

That's just a PSA. Super critical.

37:31

That is a great tip. We we'll be right back after this quick break.

37:36

And we're back, Erin. What did you think of our interview with Karrie Sanderson? I really enjoyed it.

37:42

Most of my career been more on the revenue marketing side as a CMO, obviously have the purview of brand and PR and crisis comms and all of the things in between.

37:52

But I think what Karrie was talking about is so relevant as brands become more and crossing between UX and all the things that they're doing.

38:01

It's going to become more critical to to be ahead of a lot of these crisis comms.

38:06

Yeah I'm still surprised we haven't seen more of them.

38:08

I'm not asking for it, but it just seems like there's so much there, out there already, voice recording that can imitate your voice and, I even get, I don't know if you've ever gotten that text message in a previous job that it's it's your boss texting you asking you to send them gift cards.

38:24

What's the future of that going to look like? I'm just waiting.

38:26

Not, I'm not eager, but I'm waiting for it to happen.

38:30

I think the frightening thing in talking to Karrie, if frightening is the right word is the deep fake, preparing for deep fakes.

38:38

I think that is such great advice. sure it's going to happen where these very realistic looking deep fakes out there of our CEOs or leaders.

38:48

And I think that's going to create a whole new dimension of things we need to look out for.

38:52

Yeah, I think the deep fakes thing as well as just the flood of content that's coming out because it's so easy to create stuff now, it's now more important than ever for brands to have a strong perspective about who they are and a strong brand identity so that your audience and your employees, can spot a deep fake and that they have an understanding of what you're about.

39:15

This. Generalized content is just going to be spewing out over the next few years.

39:20

And if you don't have a perspective, you're just going to get caught in the tidal waves, yeah.

39:25

And a tidal wave it is, but I don't know, Ken, what was your biggest takeaway? Yeah.

39:31

So I, after noodling it on a little bit, the thing that I'm taking away from that chat is really around the need for an AI ethics committee at your company.

39:45

And I want to expand that a little bit more and actually say, We need AI steering committees at companies because it's not just what the ethical implications are, what the guidelines are, which are important, but also how should your organization and your employees leverage AI to do their work? And I think we're not organizing as well as we could collectively about where do you store prompts that are good? There's some communities out there, but how organizations.

40:16

Putting that together and how do safely incorporate data into a GPT or, another LLM.

40:23

So I think that's where we really need to go towards.

40:27

And I thought it was great that Karrie pointed that out and it drives a little bit of brand.

40:31

If you have an AI ethics committee, the steering committee, but what you're all about, that's something communicate to your customers to build that trust and transparency, which is just so important.

40:39

Yeah. the other interesting thing that Karrie mentioned was if you don't have a person be that person.

40:46

And, I think there's a lot of opportunity for marketers to lead the charges we've been talking about.

40:51

that is why we're doing this podcast. And it's great to hear that Karries focusing on all of that work or on customer centricity, but then brand and really establishing yourself as an AI forward thinking organization.

41:05

This has been a great episode for me, probably a highlight for me on this one.

41:11

little bit earlier, but how about today's tech review of Descript? Descript has been pretty interesting as we put together this podcast, we've tried out a lot of technology and Descript is one that really stands out as being one of the more valuable ones.

41:27

It really helps with the process in of getting this podcast out the door, but I was talking about some of the AI benefits that it offers and one of the things that's really interesting is it gives you The opportunity to remove a lot of the filler words, which manually done takes a lot of time.

41:46

I can tell you as someone who also says a lot of ums and uhs, and it gives you opportunities to summarize and create chapters and.

41:56

Do a lot of different pieces that would normally take a lot of time to do.

42:00

Do you think that, I know we're, we're creating just a fir our first set of episodes right now, but if you're an organization that's maybe has a podcast or is editing a lot of video script, handle this at scale.

42:11

I think it's probably even better for people at scale.

42:14

I think that the folks that are doing a ton of videos, the transcription alone is really powerful.

42:20

And being able to, as an individual marketer, edit those videos quickly without having to have Final Cut Pro or some of those more advanced video capabilities.

42:32

That, that do require a bit more technical expertise.

42:36

This is a really good entry point for folks that are, that, that need to get videos done quickly, need the transcription, and don't necessarily have the technical expertise.

42:45

Yeah, I would agree with you and using it.

42:47

I do think that it's a little bit easier to use than some of the other tools that we've trialed.

42:54

So I do think it's good for for people just getting started.

42:58

Okay. Scale of one to 10. What are you going to rate it? Before I get into the rating, I'm going to tell you, there is a little bit of work on the AI features.

43:06

One feature in particular, if you are out there trying Descript, the AI, Oh, goodness Beta that's right now it is a little bit insane.

43:18

is beyond insane. Everyone.

43:21

I, my eyes, it looks like googly eyes.

43:24

It gave me googly It did give you googly eyes, but it gave me at least an hour of laughter was looking at it, so for that reason alone, I may do it again, just slip it in there for another episode, but that does need a little bit of work.

43:41

It's funny. I forgot about that until you just brought it up.

43:43

And now I'm like what's your rating now? Cause I've got a rating.

43:47

I lived a script, I Seven and a half out of 10.

43:51

say, I think some of it is due to the latency of my computer.

43:55

I wish it was just a little bit faster and editing, but overall, such cool tool makes my life much, much easier and makes doing this podcast a reality.

44:05

Because if we had to do the editing ourselves with another tool or something that was a little harder might not happen.

44:12

Yeah seven and a half is I think your highest score so far.

44:15

So this is a strong contender to be entered into this race of AI driven technology.

44:22

I think it's, for the googly eyes, I, I, for the laughter piece of it, I might just give it a nine.

44:27

my gosh. By the way, you can never share.

44:31

The googly eyes, which is, I will die.

44:34

might happen. How about this? How about when we get how many listeners should we get when we can post the googly eyes? Ooh, a thousand.

44:43

A thousand. Okay. When we hit a thousand listens, we will get we will post the googly eyes.

44:48

I will commit to that.

44:51

Thank you to Karrie Sanderson for a great interview.

44:54

Really enjoyed speaking with her and thank you to all of our listeners for coming on this journey with us.

45:00

And until next time, let's keep crafting the future of marketing together.