Category: Books

A series profiling recent books in the field.

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Episode 117: Marketing Artificial Intelligence, with Paul Roetzer

Marketing Artificial Intelligence

Paul Roetzer graduated with a journalism degree from the E.W. Scripps School at Ohio University and a few years afterwards he founded Ready North (formerly PR 20/20). In 2016 he founded the Marketing AI Institute. The idea for such an organization came from what Paul saw when AI began impacting his agency. He thought the only way marketers like him could work alongside AI would be by better understanding its capabilities. 

Part of their vision of educating marketers is through an annual event, and in 2019 they held their inaugural Marketing AI Conference. MAICON was on pause during lockdowns, but it came back in 2022.

In 2022, He and co-author Mike Kaput published the book we’re talking about, Marketing Artificial Intelligence. The book draws on years of research and dozens of interviews with AI marketers, executives, engineers, and entrepreneurs. He has also authored The Marketing Performance Blueprint (2014) and The Marketing Agency Blueprint (2012). Through his podcast and as a conference speaker, Paul makes AI approachable and actionable for marketers. 

He and his family live in Cleveland, Ohio. 

People, Products and Concepts in the Show:

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Episode 114: Why Privacy Is Good For Marketing, with Jodi Daniels

We don’t have the right to retain our visitors’ information just because it’s possible on the internet. 

Complying with data privacy laws can be a confusing, stressful process. We help businesses embrace a new way of working with data, going beyond compliance to create a privacy-friendly strategy that builds trust with customers.

Jodi Daniels is a privacy consultant. She founded Red Clover Advisors in 2017, and through it, she assists companies to create privacy programs, build customer trust and achieve privacy law compliance. Jodi also serves as a Fractional Chief Privacy Officer to small and medium companies. Through frequent speaking appearances and her own podcast, she shares practical tips so companies can carrying on marketing, but in a way that’s compliant and ethical.

She holds a BBA and an MBA from Emory University, and lives with her family in Atlanta.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Episode Reboot.

Take the How Data Compliant is Your Business Quiz

Data Reimagined: Building Trust One Byte at a Time

Jodi’s book, Data Reimagined: Building Trust One Byte at a Time

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Episode 111: Obviously Awesome, with April Dunford

There is a lot at stake when Companies develop some technological or physical product. But they face an equally high risk in getting the product positioning right. Weak positioning can mean the difference between success or failure.

When we don’t have our positioning nailed, it’s as if we’re talking to someone who doesn’t speak our language. And when they don’t acknowledge us, we repeat the same message even louder, as if that will get our point across. For those who remember John Cusack 80s films, you might be familiar with the movie Better Off Dead’s scene with a French foreign exchange student having dinner with her American host family.

Shouting doesn’t work when you’re using the wrong language, and it doesn’t work with the wrong positioning either. Luckily, someone has come up with the process for finding the best positioning for our product, saving our market from being subjected to random jargon. 

April Dunford was a startup executive, running sales, marketing and product at seven B2B technology startups over the course of 25 years. She is now a consultant who has had the privilege of bringing her positioning expertise to more than 100 companies. She codified her process in the 2019 book “Obviously Awesome,” which makes these ideas about positioning accessible to any company 

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

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Episode 110: Making Numbers Count, with Karla Starr

We humans are good at dealing with small numbers. So good, scientists have coined the word “Subitizing” to describe how we know small numbers as well as the back of our hand. The opposite is also true. We can’t differentiate big numbers. We know that 10 to the power of 10 is bigger than 10 to the power of 9, but how much bigger? Even on hearing that they differ by a factor of billions, we stumble to gauge that kind of scale. 

This puts those of us who present numbers in a pickle. Historical greats like Florence Nightingale had a terrible time presenting her data to government leaders. She broke with convention, framing everything in terms of soldiers not statistics, to argue how to prevent needless deaths in military hospitals.  The book in today’s show explains methods used by her & others to convey numbers that the brain has a hard time grasping.

Knowing tactics that worked for Florence,  should at the very least help us convince management to approve our marketing initiatives. 

Since graduating with a BA in Psychology and Philosophy from NYU, Karla Starr has written columns for Medium  and appeared on NPR and CBS Sunday Morning. She has also written for many magazines and won an award for the Best Science/Health story from the Society of Professional Journalists.

Her first book was Can You Learn to Be Lucky? Why Some People Seem to Win More Often Than Others. We’re talking today about the second book  Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers, with Chip Heath 

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

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Episode 109: The Smart Marketing Book, with Dan White

Dan White Smart Marketing

William of Ockham – 1287 – 1347  was an English Franciscan friar, scholastic philosopher, and catholic theologian, born in a small village in Surrey England. He had a way of reducing explanations down to their essential core, frequently and effectively showing that the simplest explanation of a phenomenon was usually the right one. Ockham used this so much, his name has become associated with this principle – which we know today as Occam’s razor.  

Dan White graduated from Cambridge University with a Masters of Arts. He has worked in marketing, market research and brand consultancy for 30 years. He is equally passionate about using imaginative visuals to bring marketing concepts to life. If people understand and remember an idea thanks to a clever framework or visual metaphor they will be able to use it in their day-to-day work. You can consider his book Smart Marketing to help you apply Occam’s Razor to today’s marketing problems. 

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show