Author: Show Runner

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Episode 54: The Visual Sale with Tyler Lessard – Summer Books

Disclaimer: The company featured here is not a sponsor of the show, nor have I affiliated with them. They simply bring a perspective that I think you’ll get some use from.

The newest book in our #SummerMarketingBooks series talks about how to take sales & marketing beyond the printed or spoken word.

Our guest Tyler Lessard has worked at high-flying tech companies like BlackBerry and lives in the Waterloo Ontario high-tech hub with his wife and four kids. Whenever he speaks on stage or is a guest on a show, he talks about how to modernize the way sales and marketing people communicate. I consider him to be a marketer’s marketer. What I mean by that is he’s dialed in to marketing tech, so seeing him come out with a book in 2020 called, The Visual Sale, I knew I needed to pay more attention to video. 

Listen in the show for the reasons why he thinks today’s buyers expect us to show up visually, not just in text they read or orally over the phone. He walks us through how to make videos seen when prospects are researching a purchase, when they are ready to decide and even after the sale. Most importantly, take it from a guy who describes himself as a hacky video creator, how little you need to get started shooting video.   

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

4 E’s of Video:

  • Educational
  • Engaging
  • Emotional
  • Empathetic

Marshall McLuhan assertion that “The Medium is the Message”

How Walt Disney appeared on video (we’ve moved past this kind of talking head video)

Episode Reboot

Great quote from his book: “If you don’t think that video can do a better job than text on a webpage or text in an email, think again!”

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Episode 53: Digital Marketing in an AI World with Fred Vallaeys – Summer Books

Disclaimer: The company featured here is not a sponsor of the show, nor have I affiliated with them. They simply bring a perspective that I think you’ll get some use from.

Chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov was famously beaten in 1997 by a supercomputer built by dozens of IBM technologists. A Slate article looking at how Deep Blue changed chess said “The change here wasn’t just that a computer could win, but that a computer could help human players win if incorporated into their training regimes effectively.”

The same thing is happening with PPC Platforms. Since 2011, Google has been integrating AI into many of their products, and every campaign feature Google Ads rolls out seems to take away control from us humans and give it to their machines. So if we’re going to follow Kasparov’ lead and get better at this game with the AI, the question becomes, what’s the process for training an ad platform’s AI, when it’s writing programming that only it knows, and even the technologists running it don’t know?

Some answers are contained in the book Digital Marketing in an AI World. Fred Vallaeys was one of the first 500 employees at Google where he spent 10 years building AdWords and teaching advertisers how to get the most out of it as Google’s AdWords Evangelist. Today he serves as Co-Founding CEO of Optmyzr, a PPC management software system. Fred is a fixture on the marketing conference circuit and blazed new trails with online industry learning through Optmyz’s PPC Town Halls. 

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Episode Reboot: 

Remember, computers have a different kind of smarts than us.

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Episode 52: Unfair Marketing with David Rodnitzky – Summer Books

Has this ever happened in your career?

  • Sales told you that a deal was lost even though you have a superior product
  • You’ve seen the positioning statements listed in your website or in your ads twisted by your competitors, to exploit some weakness
  • You saw an industry award or splashy press go to a competitor rather than to you
  • You faced a rival brand undercutting your pricing to grab your market share 

It’s maddening when this happens, but the truth is, marketers don’t get participation ribbons. Each of these things may be unfair, but they are also situations where you could have grabbed the upper hand and reaped the benefit over your competitor.  

That’s the premise of the book Unfair Marketing which came out in 2021, written by David Rodnitsky He is the founder of 3Q Digital, an agency that has over 350 digital marketers devoted to advertising, analytics, decision science, strategic consulting, creative, and conversion rate optimization. Many of 3Q’s clients are in silicon valley,  which is where they are based. You would no doubt know the names of the companies they serve.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

David’s Five levers:

  1. Unfair Data
  2. Unfair Knowledge
  3. Unfair Brand
  4. Unfair Access
  5. Unfair Money

Episode Reboot. 

Get a free copy of the book at www.3qdigital.com/unfair-marketing

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Episode 51: The AI Marketing Canvas with Raj Venkatesan – Summer Books

Are you looking at how your marketing can use AI? That’s good if you are, but it’s not enough to know how it works. Whether you are embedded in marketing operations or you’re an executive who oversees it, you must also figure out how to get your organization to buy into AI. You’ll need stakeholders who own precious data, you’ll need knowledge experts to train your models, you’ll possibly need operations folks to change what they deliver…as AI informs what you offer. Lastly, you’ll need money – getting that money will take you proving that investing in AI yields a positive ROI. So by now, you’re probably wondering how you can implement AI. Well, if you are, you will definitely be interested in the framework called the “The AI Marketing Canvas”

It’s all detailed in a book by the same name, co-authored by Raj Venkatesan, along with Jim Lecinski.

Professor Venkatesan is a professor at the Darden School of Business at U of Virginia. He is also a co-author of the book Cutting Edge Marketing Analytics. Before coming to Darden, Venkatesan taught graduate students at the University of Connecticut. There, he was the recipient of the MBA Teacher of the Year Award. He received his Ph.D. in marketing from the University of Houston and his B.E. in computer engineering from the University of Madras. He has consulted with firms in the technology, retailing, media, industrial goods and pharmaceutical industries. 

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Framework’s 5 stages, reproduced with permission:

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Episode 50: Join or Die, Digital Advertising in the age of Automation by Patrick Gilbert – Summer Books

This is the fifth book of our “Summer Books” series and we’re even going social with the hashtag, #SummerMarketingBooks on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. This book focuses on Pay-Per-Click marketing, and whether you do any PPC yourself or outsource, you should be aware of how much of a ground-shaking shift artificial intelligence is making here. Remember that Google & Facebook have been investing enormous sums of money on AI. Their ad empires pretty much run on AI now, and it’s vaulted them to become two of the world’s top 10 companies.

While acknowledging that this sounds ominous for advertisers, our author believes that by joining with them on campaign automation, we can actually thrive. Our author’s seen this shift happen first-hand, as part of the NY-based agency Adventure Media, where he serves as COO. his book, Join or Die: Digital Advertising in the age of Automation, came out in 2020.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show