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:

Episode 41: How Google Analytics 4 Impacts Marketers with Jim Cain

In fall 2020, Google released version 4 of their Google Analytics tool (here is the official announcement of GA4). Despite its description as a new version, this is actually a brand new product. In fact, it’s part of Google’s switch to a whole new technology stack, and the ripples of their move extend to the remotest corners of a marketer’s world.

What do you need to know about GA4? For one, it has a different interface from the existing “Universal” version of GA. It doesn’t have some features and functions that you assume are in GA. At the same time, there are things that GA4 has that you haven’t been able to get before without paying for GA Premium. 

My guide for this tour of GA4 is Jim Cain, who founded the analytics consultancy Napkyn in 2009, one of only a few Premier Google Marketing Platform Solution Partners. If you want to know what to do about GA4, Jim will tell you how Napkyn is dealing with it in their client work.

People, products and Concepts mentioned on the show:

Episode Reboot

Set up a GA4 Property onto your existing GA account as soon as possible, to run it in parallel with GA3.