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Martech is in upheaval: welcome to your must-listen podcast to understand the current state of the Martech industry.
In this Office Hours episode, hosts Jacqueline Freedman and Juan Mendoza dig into the corporate shakeups, shifting power dynamics, and AI debates that are reshaping the industry.
From Yotpo abruptly shutting down its email arm before the holidays, to Litmus layoffs after acquisition, to Amplitude dethroning Adobe in the latest Forrester Wave, no corner of Martech feels stable. The duo also questions whether analyst firms like Gartner still matter and get "spicy" debating if AI is a powerful copilot or dangerous crutch for marketers. If you're a Martech leader, marketing ops pro, or exec marketing technology bets, this episode gives you the no-BS insights you need to stay ahead.
Highlights
Why Yotpo's exit and Litmus layoffs signal deeper risks in Martech.
How to spot an "overripe Avocado" company and avoid relying on one.
What Amplitudes's rise means for Adobe and the future of Analytics.
Why analyst firms may be losing relevance in an age of distributed authority.
The risks and rewards of AI: augmentation vs. outsourcing your thinking.
Timestamps
01:19 - Trouble in Email Land: Yotpo shuts down its email business and Litmus faces layoffs after acquisition.
07:15 - The overripe Avocado Theory: How to spot when tech companies are past their prime.
09:36 - Analytics Shake-Up: Amplitude rises in Forrester's Wave, Adobe loses ground, and the future of analytics suites.
15:11 - Analyst Firms in Question: Gartner's origins, warning influence, and whether traditional authority still matters.
23:50 - The AI Debate: Is GenAI a helpful copilot or a "drug dealer" strategy that erodes critical thinking?
30:21 - Subscriber Q&A: Ben from Teachable asks about AI's impact on future marketing leadership.
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Creators and Guests
What is Making Sense of Martech?
Unfiltered takes on the biggest shifts in marketing technology. We spotlight what matters, who's leading (or lagging), and what's next. In Martech, clarity is power — and we're here to deliver it.
Making Sense of Martech: Office Hours - Yotpo & Litmus Analysis
Jacqueline Freedman: Welcome to the Making Sense of Martech podcast. I'm Jacqueline Freedman.
Juan Mendoza: And I'm Juan Mendoza.
Jacqueline: And this is Office Hours, where we cut through the noise and discuss the latest and greatest in the Martech landscape. So, why are we here, Juan?
Juan: So way back, and Jacqueline, you have been resurrecting the Making Sense of Martech podcast. So how does it feel? We're starting again. It's really exciting.
Jacqueline: Starting anew, and my perfectionism is in full display, as you know.
Juan: Yeah, I think for us, you know, you kind of were nudging at my elbow for the past six months going, "You should start the podcast again, you should start the podcast again." And then we've had hundreds and hundreds of people reaching out to us going, "Hey, we'd love to see the podcast back." And so I've been dragged kicking and screaming back to launch Making Sense of Martech, but it is very different from what we were doing in the past and we're really excited about it. In Martech every week, there's so much stuff that changes. There's news, there's funding announcements, there's companies that disappear, there's all kinds of stuff. And so this podcast is really about the commentary and the analysis to help you, the Martech leader in your business, to make the best choices around the technology, the strategy, and ultimately delivering for your customer.
Jacqueline: And to that, let's get started.
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Trouble in Emailland: Yotpo
Juan: So first up, we have trouble in Emailland. So—
Jacqueline: My favorite land! How dare there be trouble?
Juan: I know, email is such a core piece of Martech. But there's a company called Yotpo. You may have heard of it, you may not have. It is an Israeli-based—it started as a referral, recommendation, customer review type platform. But then they shifted into email marketing recently and SMS as well, so they had their own email marketing customer experience platform. But then now, just before holiday season—which is crazy, we're heading up into Christmas and New Year's and Black Friday Cyber Monday—they've decided to basically close that whole part of their business and leaving a lot of retailers and e-com people out in the street. Jacqueline, what's your point of view on this?
Jacqueline: Well, one, very disappointing for their current customers. I do appreciate that they have respectively worked with Omnisend and Attentive to help, you know, usher in some migration help and figure things out. But at the same time, not every single one of these companies can handle this on top of their busiest season with Black Friday Cyber Monday. And also, we're completely neglecting the actual employees. There were 34% of the company got laid off. Literally a third of the company is gone. And it's already a tough market, aren't we all recognizing the macroeconomic conditions? And it's rather disappointing. Obviously, makes sense, things happen, bets don't work out, but at the same time, where was the due diligence to ensure this was a viable business unit to bring on?
Juan: And if you look at Tomer Tagrin—so he's the CEO and the co-founder of Yotpo—his point of view is that customers want sharper tools, not just an all-in-one platform. That is something that we're seeing not just with Yotpo, but several other companies that made forays into categories that really don't make sense for them or often look like they could make sense, they could actually be a way to extend their existing product line, but often they're already in a box. You know, most enterprise Martech buyers, they put a technology vendor in a box, and then getting out of that box—say with Yotpo as an example, customer reviews and testimonials—that box is very well defined. If you're looking for that software, they will be one of the top three in the category set. But moving into email and SMS, you're competing with a galaxy of other companies: Klaviyo, Attentive, Omnisend, and then I would say there's at least several dozen other companies that are serving the enterprise space explicitly. And so you can kind of see that why is this happening right now? Why not do it in January when, you know, we're past the holiday season? It's because they need to make a change now because their balance sheet is not working, you know? If you're in a company—
Jacqueline: And I feel for them. Yeah, the path to profitability is hard. I mean, I famously worked at WeWork. I left before it crashed, but profitability is very difficult and also having the right business plan doesn't always work out. In—on paper it could look great, but in reality it doesn't pan out the way you had planned for it.
Juan: Yeah, and even though we'd like to look at Yotpo's balance sheet, don't get me wrong, the only proxy that we really have is their employee count. And according to LinkedIn, since 2023, it's been flatlining. There's been no new employees brought on, 4% growth, literally nothing. And so you can make an argument there to say, "Well, this new product line, it's going to generate a lot of growth and revenue growth, but not profitable." That's enough to keep investors happy, don't get me wrong. But if you're not seeing that growth, if you're not seeing the profitability, then yeah, of course they're going to close it down. So it does seem like a handbrake going, "Yep, I know this is going to annoy a lot of retailers ramping up," you know, and like, if you ever worked in a retail or e-commerce brand, you know that this is so difficult to actually ramp up to Black Friday Cyber Monday, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and all these public holidays and also shopping seasons, even with your own technology stack in place, you know? It is not easy. But then having to switch platforms now, it makes it even harder. But—this is kind of emblematic of someone in the boardroom said, "We have to rip the handbrake now, because it's not going to work. They may not survive past Christmas." So it's a very exciting time, but we also have more troubles in the Emailland. Let's talk a bit about Litmus.
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Trouble in Emailland: Litmus
Juan: So, you are a lot more familiar with Litmus than I am, but tell us a bit about the platform, what it actually does, and then what change they made in the past couple weeks.
Jacqueline: Yeah, Litmus is most famously known for their email rendering capabilities. They have other aspects and also they were a huge proponent of building out the email geeks and email community over the past 10, 15 years. And it's just been beating after beating every couple months. There is just something that comes along and is just deeply disappointing, not just from a consumer, from a user's perspective, but also from a bottom-line perspective. I mean, they literally overnight were like, "Hey, here's a 400% increase with no actual product feature change." You're not Salesforce, and also you don't want to embody that either. At least have given a bone of a new feature or something along the lines when—no, they didn't do anything after already a difficult couple of months where they got acquired by Validity, which should be great, except for the same day of the acquisition they also laid off 82% of the company based off of what we're seeing on LinkedIn insights.
Juan: And so that is pretty big. I mean, they've had a lot of acquisitions, they've been running a playbook, you know, MailCharts, Return Path, 250ok, BrightVerify. What is it about these types of email platforms that they acquire a company and then they jack up the prices all of a sudden? It doesn't seem like there's a growth story there. It seems like almost a rescue mission to go, "Okay, we're taking on a lame duck and then basically stripping out all their costs, jacking up the price and trying to get it make that company profitable or at least back to sort of baseline."
Jacqueline: Yeah, I mean, it's just corporate greed if we're being honest. It's just the consistent playbook of late-stage capitalism happening over and over. But my main issue not just with Litmus, but also Yotpo and any other company in flux and going through transition that might not be the most favorable is: be earnest and honest about it instead of projecting backwards and saying, "Hey, don't call us out for our stuff." And let's just say I've gotten a lot of messages saying the opposite.
Juan: Exactly. I have a theory for this: it's called the overwrought avocado theory.
Jacqueline: Ooh!
Juan: Nobody likes eating an overwrought avocado. You open it up, it's all black; nobody's eating that. Tech companies are kind of the same way, you know? There is a season where they're ripe, they're delicious, and everyone wants to eat them. But then—
Jacqueline: It's like three seconds.
Juan: And it is, it is literally—if you put them next to some bananas—hot tip at home for those wanting to get your avocados more ripe, put them next to some bananas, the potassium in the banana will actually make the avocados more ripe. But anyway, this is not a cooking show. Basically, what we—what I'm getting at here is that on any timescale a company will not survive. Like every company will fail at some point. It doesn't matter if you're the largest company in the world or the smallest one, every company will eventually fail. And there's a continuum there for how the season in which that company is successful. And then over the time it's just kind of holding on to the value they created years or months before. And the example with Litmus here, it's very much like that, you know? They had their season of growth and now they're kind of like an overwrought avocado, you know? You start to see this a lot, yeah, with organizations where, you know, the customer value—the customer is actually missing in the entire value proposition. Raising prices without any justification is a really good overwrought avocado, you know? It's a very good example of a company that's had its day, ripe for disruption, and then just getting to the tail end of—of their season of growth. And the tech industry moves very quickly. The stuff that's really interesting today is yesterday's news tomorrow. And so I guess for most companies that timeline is much longer, say in decades or in 50 to 100 years, but in technology segment and especially marketing technology, this stuff happens in a couple years, you know?
Jacqueline: It's true.
Juan: If you are looking at a platform like Litmus or any other platform, what are the tell-tale signs of an overwrought avocado? I would say number one, they jack up the prices. Number two, aggressive sales teams that use all kinds of tactics to try and get—get you to buy. They don't talk to the value, don't show the value, they use other political tactics and leverage to get you to buy products. And then the—lastly, like, the business itself is more concerned with its own political situation instead of innovating for the customer. The day a—a company stops innovating, they start acquiring as well to try and cover the innovation gap. That's when you know they're starting to turn overwrought.
Jacqueline: I wholeheartedly agree. I think there's been a lot of interesting acquisitions lately that are in line with what you're saying.
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Forrester Wave: Digital Analytics Solutions
Jacqueline: But transitioning slightly, the latest Forrester Wave for Digital Analytics Solutions came out. It's the first ever, and Amplitude won. I'm curious to hear what your thoughts are, since especially Adobe Analytics, which has always been seen as the fortress in enterprise, is no longer in that leader spot.
Juan: Yeah, no one really wins these things. I should probably start with that.
Jacqueline: What do you mean? There's an award ceremony! It's called "The Event" that they make you pay thousands upon thousands of dollars to showcase yourself at.
Juan: Yes and no. So yes, in both the Forrester Wave and the Magic Quadrant, the top right-hand corner is where everyone wants to be. They want to be the leader, they want to be the visionary, they want to be those—the company that's actually in the top right. However, what happened with this one, given that it's its first—Forrester's first digital analytics solution wave, Amplitude is a curious sort of contender against Adobe. Now, you mentioned it before, Jacqueline, that Adobe Analytics is a fortress. You know, you work with any large enterprise business, you're going to see Adobe Analytics in there somewhere. It is very much at the core of the digital experience. But Adobe has been losing ground. Let's go back to the overwrought avocado example. They've been losing ground to other players. And one of those players is Amplitude.
Jacqueline: Thank goodness.
Juan: Yeah, and—and that's why Amplitude is a curious example there because in their world they have traditionally worked mostly with product and UX analytics. So it's a very different department and not holistic business-wide analytics, very much in that product side. But they're now starting to take that business away, and it's very interesting to see. I think, you know, the question I have is, is this a battle worth fighting? You know, like, you asked this question as well. Like, do analytics—do we actually need analytics suites like this anymore? You know? Is it a battle worth fighting? What do you think?
Jacqueline: Yeah, I—I don't think so. I'm a huge proponent of the data warehouse or data lake, however you want to call and coin and term it these days, as the primary source of truth. And then you leverage front-end visualizations from there. And whether that is through a third-party app or through dashboards depending on what it is and what it's meant to be used for, I would much rather have a single source of truth that then the entire company is leveraging because marketing in and of itself is always put in silos. We're always kind of the underdog that has to prove they need to exist, versus no one's going to question if engineering needs a new tool or if they need to exist. It is this self-perpetuating prophecy of just "what do you need this for?" And it's not just within the marketing department and the product department now; it's "why do we need a separate tool?" And so one, I'm surprised this Forrester Wave is just launched. I feel like it should be at least 10 years old. But also, what is the future for any one of these tools? I want to hear if you have an opposing opinion.
Juan: I've worked with a lot of Adobe Analytics instances, and the advantage of it, especially if you're on the Adobe stack anyway, is that you can create—you can analyze a segment, create a segment, and then push it down to downstream tools. Like, that was the vision of Adobe Analytics initially was like, "Okay, you can see a high-growth segment here or a customer that's churning, you can actually push that into Journey Optimizer or Adobe Target. You can actually push them into the other experience tools." It was supposed to be the central hub of intelligence. Now, I've seen some brands do that and it's worked. I've also seen brands—
Jacqueline: How many? Can you count them on your hand?
Juan: Not—okay, I can count them on—yeah, two fingers, right? It has worked in some examples. But that was the vision, right? Which is a very cool vision to say, "That's connected," to go, "Okay, there's a customer group that we need to focus on, we can go and create a segment and activate that without having to touch any other technology." That's the vision. It hasn't really come true for a lot of folks, but I would say it's a bit blended. But on the flip side, I've worked with plenty of companies that people would be hired and people would be fired based on what they're seeing in the Adobe Analytics dashboard. And I am not joking. It is the core area in which they would assess their revenue uplift from experimentation, from personalization campaigns, from app programs. All of those things are actually tied in with Adobe Analytics, and all of—all of your forecasting is based on that. So if you have like an amazing data and analytics team and you throw them at Adobe Analytics, they connect it well, the data's collected and it's clean, I've seen it actually make a lot of sense. So I would say that there is a lot of value there. But in connecting both product and holistic marketing analytics, that's the opportunity, I think. And the—Amplitude, that's—I think that's what they're going after is connecting them because product is not divorced from marketing. What's going out on the emails or the campaigns that go out on the website is also the same as experimentation on a digital product. You know, so I would say that those—those worlds need to come closer together. And I would say that this is great. I think Adobe Analytics needs more competition. You know, it's Google Analytics 4, Adobe Analytics. GA4 dropped the ball massively when they shifted a couple years ago, which has been—
Jacqueline: Yeah.
Juan: Which has been very good for Adobe and very good for Amplitude as well. But now Adobe kind of stands alone as that sort of analytics marketing analytics suite of choice. I think it's good to see groups like Amplitude disrupt them. We need more of that.
Jacqueline: Oh yeah. I am famously always betting on all the horses, not just one singular horse. That said, this could be a great example of: is that all-in-one solution actually the answer, or is having a modular design of you're able to plug and play what you want and how you want it make more sense? And it's really ultimately a philosophical choice in terms of architecture and how any one company goes about implementing as well as leveraging their own data and use cases.
Juan: Oh yeah. It's very interesting.
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The Fall of Analyst Firms?
Juan: In more troubling news, I recently posted about a—a bit of a change in the direction of analyst firms at the moment. We saw Gartner make a bunch of news this past week and a half. Their stock price is tanking; it's back to 2022 levels by the looks of it. And there's a lot of commentary about the analyst firms not being able to keep up with AI and, you know, their business model doesn't really suit the world in which you can use ChatGPT to get technology advice, you know? But I have a different take on this. I mean, I've been reading the story of Gideon Gartner. So Gideon Gartner was this brilliant, brilliant analyst who started out in Wall Street, worked for Oppenheimer, before that he worked for IBM. This is back in the '70s and the early '80s. And back then, IBM was kind of our version of Salesforce, you know? It was our version of Amazon. It was our version of almost all—Google and all the major tech companies. It was the technology company to be.
Jacqueline: It was the hottest place to be.
Juan: It was the hottest place to be. This man, Gideon Gartner, was in this context in which he was building technologies, analyzing, you know, business strategies around tech companies back then. And then he got a job with a Wall Street analyst firm. One of his first projects was to analyze IBM. And his first analysis project was so impactful, so popular with the investor communities, that his employer gave him a $25,000 bonus within his first three months of working there. And $25,000 back then is a lot more money today, right? Imagine working—you'd never worked in that field before, getting in your first job, you do your first report, and it's widely successful. So clearly Gideon had a knack; like he had a skillset there around analyzing tech.
Jacqueline: Like he found—he found a niche that was missing in a lot of ways.
Juan: Yeah. Yeah, and it was also ascendent. So you had all these technology businesses, IDC was only a few years old. You know, there was all these very interesting technology analysts coming to market. And funnily enough, he used that $25,000 to buy a Mercedes-Benz SL 250.
Jacqueline: That's what he did? Why? I would hope he's an actual Wall Street guy and would invest instead, but you know, depreciating assets and all.
Juan: Because he's a Wall Street guy! Of course you're going to do that, you know? If I was 29 and I just got handed $25,000 in the '70s, what am I going to do? Yeah, I'm going to go buy a Mercedes. Why not? You know? And going back to our previous topic about Amplitude and Adobe Analytics and the Forrester Wave, Gartner was the first organization to create the Magic Quadrant, which was that very simple 2x2 grid of technology and how they're ranked on their performance. They also had something else which is quite similar and very interesting: was called a Green Sheet. So back in those days, you know, analyst reports would be essays and they would be 10,000 words and verbose and you couldn't find everything. But Gartner had this insight, which was: no, the investors and the technology procurement people really need two pages. They need "who's the top performers" and "why." And so that was their sort of innovation to simplify the analyst work. They were also the first group to work with the brands, with the technology vendors, and also the investor community. And so Gartner was like the most innovative—it's like the Open AI of the information landscape back in the day. Very popular. If you're in the '80s and you are wanting to understand tech, Gartner was the place. But now, I would say that their influence is wavering. I would say I—we talk to many marketing technology executives and yes, we only work in one domain, you know, works across so many different technology verticals, but when we go and talk to marketing technology execs, we get things like, "Who's Gartner? We would never rely on a Magic Quadrant for our technology purchasing decision." Increasingly the technology vendors are not seeing Gartner as relevant as they used to be. And so I think there's something happening there where we're kind of seeing the, you know, Gartner, IDC, Forrester—these are 40, 50-year-old companies now. The generation of the new executives that are coming into the market, they're now starting to lead procurement, now they're starting to think about their own technology strategy. Those folks are relying less and less on Gartner. And so I think that, you know, this stock tanking significantly is—yeah, maybe a bit of that is AI. I would actually say they would probably benefit more from AI because of their brand proposition. But on the flip side, I actually say it's just it's a new generation of executives coming into all of the industries they serve. And obviously, you know, we're a little bit biased here because we also are an analyst firm and we also talk to the marketing technology industry explicitly about that. But, you know, that's kind of what I'm seeing there around the analyst firms. But you, Jacqueline, you have been at war with some of these groups in the past, so I'm very—I'm very curious about your take.
Jacqueline: Yeah, I am definitely in agreement. I think both Gartner, Forrester, IDC—you name it—have been incredible, and the actual analysis is excellent. However, that two-pager, it's not it. And I also think the requirements that sometimes are leveraged that box certain companies out that are actually very highly regarded and well used across enterprise companies and SMBs, mid-market, you name it, I think there's a lot of mistakes, missteps—just misalignment. Anything with a "mis," that's what I see. In addition, all that to say I do think this is related to AI because people think if they ask ChatGPT, "Give me an evaluation of X, Y, and Z," it's going to get you what you want. When in reality, it is pulling and calling from the actual website, it is pulling from certain conversations maybe on Reddit, all of which are not always the most informed or even validated. And so there is value to having some form of analysis. But I get the—the joy, the guise, the—the wave-finding of "what is ChatGPT going to tell me as my best email service provider based off of my requirements?" Very rarely is it going to actually be accurate. But it might point you in the right direction of "Hey, these are the top five you should consider." I mean, the amount of times I—I speak with clients and potential clients who are looking at a B2B platform, a B2C platform, and they're in retail. And I'm like, "Hold on. What is your backend? Why are we not starting there? Why are we looking at B2B platform?" And this is where the analysis is important because to your point of aggressive sales people earlier on, sales is—it's not their fault, we respect sales, however, sometimes you're giving faulty information and as a result, it's a bait and switch. And I've been there, and so now I'm most sales people's least favorite person because I don't allow for that to happen.
Juan: Yeah, I think there's a—there's an overarching cultural shift as well. You know, the way we think about Gartner, Forrester, IDC, and that whole area of tech analysis is that there's what we call an authority economy, which is everyone needs an authority. If it's not your parents, it's your boss. If you have children, you're the authority over them. If it's a head schoolmaster, it's the teacher. You know, everyone needs an authority. And in the technology industry, there is authorities, you know? There are folks that have a overestimated share of influence. And Gartner, Forrester and these groups, that's what they play. They're an authority. They're also insurance, you know? You don't get fired for hiring—for buying IBM, that's what they used to say, you know? And why do people say that? Well, it's because groups like Gartner made them extremely famous, you know? And so a lot of the tech vendors rely on the second-hand influence and authority that Gartner conveys to them, you know? And that's been their business model for a long time. And I would actually say authority as a concept has changed significantly in our culture, you know? The way that we think about authority as people that are millennials is very different from the generation before us that, you know, they really appeal to authority. I'll give you one example: if you worked at IBM back in the '70s, you were considered to work there for the rest of your life. 70 years would be working at IBM. It would be insane to leave IBM. But Gideon Gartner did it. He actually left IBM against many people saying, "You are leaving the best company in the world, you are stupid." But that doesn't happen anymore, you know? In our culture, people jump three to four years in a job. Very unlikely someone will say, "I'm going to work at this company for the rest of my life." Most companies don't exist for the rest of your life, you know?
Jacqueline: That's true.
Juan: Like, there's been a cultural headwind there that is almost impossible for the larger firms to—because I would say that authority is actually more distributed now. People are looking to their peers. They're looking to other people. The amount of brands that we talk to today that say, "We don't talk to a consultancy, we don't talk to an analyst firm. What we do is that we go talk to a brand that's already done the work that we're trying to do. And we'll sit down with them and invest money in workshopping how they did it." That's where the authority is coming from. It's actually far more of a level playing field than it was before and less of a headmaster saying, "You should do this and you should do that," and everyone nodding along and saying, "Yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir." So I would say that it's a very, very different climate. And I think it's quite exciting. I mean, it's a flattening of authority in a tech industry that definitely needs it, you know? It's a very exciting—
Jacqueline: Well, it's definitely an old guard versus new guard approach. And it's been very needed for a long time.
Juan: Oh yeah. It's very exciting.
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ChatGPT: The "Drug Dealer Strategy"?
Juan: Okay, moving on to something that is a little bit more innovative than Gartner and Forrester. It's a little spicy as well. I got in trouble on LinkedIn a few weeks ago because I called ChatGPT our version of crack cocaine. Okay, let me just pause it there.
Jacqueline: When you say you got in trouble, I don't know if "trouble" was the correct word. You actually went viral, which congratulations, I'm so sorry. Sounds like a rough situation.
Juan: Never go viral on LinkedIn. I tell you, it is the worst thing that can ever happen to you. It's a post that reached about close to 750,000 people, hundreds and hundreds of comments, very interesting sort of perspectives from folks. I'll read you what the post was. Let me read it out and I'm going to let you decide on where you sit on this fence. But I said that ChatGPT is free to use. I call it the drug dealer strategy. It's free, it's fun, with no risks or costs. But after a while, you'll start to rely on it. Fast forward a few years and the paywalls go up, but now you need ChatGPT to think. I tell my team, so for The Martech Weekly, the people who are not using these tools will likely be the standout candidates in the best performing employees. Why? Because they're thinking for themselves. They do not outsource their own thinking. So be very careful. So I had two camps. This was one of those classic sort of perspectives where you had people in two different, very different camps arguing against each other in the comments. One camp was like, "You are a Luddite, this technology is so innovative and not using it is the stupidest thing I've ever heard." That's one camp. The other camp was like, "Yeah, I've been using ChatGPT and I don't want to outsource my thinking anymore. It's diminishing my—my skills as an employee." And so that was kind of the post that caused a lot of contention. But it is a very important topic right now. I would actually say if you're an enterprise marketer, there are people in your team right now using ChatGPT and other tools to write copy. Now—
Jacqueline: Or for everything. And they're slowly starting to learn, "Oh, don't include em-dashes, don't include these statements because everyone on LinkedIn keeps proliferating the exact same 'I can tell this was made out of AI' and so and so did it." My favorite part of this whole post is like: you did not respond to a singular comment. You just let it be. You're like, "I'm not dealing with this. Onto the next."
Juan: Yeah, and how many of those comments were ChatGPT written anyway? So, you know, the irony of that is hilarious. But I guess the point I'm trying to raise here is that in our business at least, we are seeing that we've actually had to write an AI policy. And that's actually additional work because now employees are using ChatGPT to outsource their thinking and we're just getting blander copy. We're getting this in LinkedIn a lot where people are reaching out and saying, "You know, my copy that I wrote is being proofread and checked by an AI bot, and now I'm getting feedback from AI." Is that really where we want to be? The better—best ideas are not going to come from doing that. And neither is it will be outsourcing your thinking. So my argument is that, you know, OpenAI and all the rest of the platforms, they're using the very traditional framework that Peter Thiel set down years and years ago of the value creation/value capture. It's a drug dealer strategy. You create something, you set it out for free and everyone uses it, and then you get them dependent and hooked on it and then eventually you have to charge—they'll pay for using it. I do not want to be in a position in my own career where I have to pay ChatGPT to think. There's a new platform called Cluely, C-L-U-E-L-Y, and they just did this hilarious New York Times New York billboard, basically saying, "Hi, I'm 21, I built this tool, go check it out." And this cost me a lot of money, right in Times Square, you know? It's crazy. But anyway, Cluely is even worse. It's a tool that—oh no, get this, it sits on your desktop and it will listen in on your calls and then prompt—listen in and then when you need to answer questions it will just tell you the answers. So you have Zoom on one side and then on the other side you have Cluely just giving you answers to questions like interviews and sales meetings and things like that. I get it that like, this is an amazing technology that can help a lot of people. For people that don't know English or the language that they're trying to operate in, a massive boost in productivity, don't get me wrong. But on the other side, do you really want to have all your thinking coming from an AI bot that'll eventually charge you for the pleasure? I would say no. And that's what I'm trying to caution people.
Jacqueline: Some people do, though.
Juan: Yeah.
Jacqueline: I agree with the caution and the cautionary tale. I do see a lot of value if your prompt is excellent. So for example, anytime I write most things, I write it and then I ask ChatGPT if you could just tighten it, because sometimes I get a little wordy here and there and I'm like "is there a better way to restructure this one sentence?" And occasionally I'll accept it, but also, a lot of time I reject what—because it changes the meaning. You really have to—if you have a unique voice and want to keep it, you gotta fight for it.
Juan: Yeah, that's right. And I would just say watch and see, you know, monitor and reflect on your own use of these technologies because it is different from any other product. You know, Steve Jobs once said that the computer was a bicycle for the mind. But the bicycle was something you still had to pedal. You still had to put effort into it. If you're using technology to take all the effort out of your work and you can still get by, there is a big problem there. And I would say no. Do you want to be smarter? Do you want to have original thinking? Do you want to be more technically skilled? All those things matter when it comes to using these tools. And I think that's what people are starting realizing is that a reliance on these technologies will actually make your life and career duller because of it, because you don't—even though it's hard to learn new things, you know? It's hard to actually build new skills. But the benefit is that you have the skills and you get the reward from building those skills up. And so that's what I'm saying. If you want people to think for themselves, take away their use of ChatGPT. I mean, it sounds terrible, but I think it's a great way to think about the use of this technology.
Jacqueline: It's so spicy!
Juan: I would say, I would say—it is very much a problem of thinking. Do you want to think for yourself or not? Answer that question and then that'll tell you how you're going to use these tools. I use the tools myself from time to time, but it's never for anything that requires me to actually sit down and think because I do not want to lose those skills. And it's a very interesting way of thinking about it.
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Is AI Benefitting Martech Careers?
Juan: But speaking of AI, there is a question—this is from Ben at Teachable. I'm going to throw this one to you, Jacqueline, because I'm going to get off my AI pedestal for a minute, okay? I want you to—
Jacqueline: Please do! You've been on there for a long time.
Juan: Thank you so much. Here's his question: "Is AI weaving its way into everything really going to set us up well in the future for leadership roles in marketing since we understand tools, data and systems well?" So what he's getting at though is that will AI benefit our—my career? You know? Will it benefit these roles? Should I continue to invest in my own career here now that AI's influencing so much in marketing?
Jacqueline: I love this question because it is a great example of where vibe coding can go wrong. I know that's completely unrelated to this specific question. However, I think vibe coding is great concept for those who don't know: it is for a non-engineer to prompt your way into building some sort of app. There's amazing tools out there like Lovable, you name it; no shade to it because it's excellent and I highly recommend it especially for prototyping and MVPs. But if you're not an engineer, that last 20% of making something work the way you want it to work is not possible, at least not in the same time efficiency, because you don't understand the fundamentals. And so this is how I think about all things marketing: whether it's the tools, the data, where the systems live, how they interconnect. AI will be beyond helpful. I mean, every platform has AI right now. It's all a wrapper. And there are very few actual interfaces where AI is at the core and center. Things are all about to change in the next, you know, six seconds to six years; we don't know what's in store. That said, nothing will take away from the fact that you can call out when this data analysis doesn't make sense. You can import your CSV file of all these different findings and hopefully get a cheat code to maybe some potentially interesting things double click. But rarely will it understand the full business context in the way if you're a well-adept marketer who understands how everything is the inner working, especially in marketing technology, you're the nexus of it all. You need to be able to translate things to product, to engineering, to a CMO, to sales—you name it, depending on your business model. And in my opinion, it's both setting us up well for the future but really only those who know how to navigate it.
Juan: Yeah, mastery of AI is very different from mastering marketing strategy. And I think my—my advice to Ben, just to piggyback off what you're saying there, Jax, is: think about the number one thing that AI is going to do to generate revenue in your business. Strip away all of the nonsense: the AI co-pilots, the LLMs, all this other stuff. What is the one thing that you think is going to be generating new growth and revenue through using these tools? If you hone in on that and focus your skillset around that, you're going to win because even though we have technology vendors saying you don't need to do a campaign anymore, AI can build it for you, you don't need to set up segments and run blueprints and things like that and an AI can do that for you, it still needs human discernment and judgment, you know? So I would say look at where the money is going, not where the money is being spent, but where the money is coming from your customers and figure out where AI can influence that. And if the answer is there's nothing, not very little, then ignore it. It's okay to ignore AI.
Jacqueline: Hot take!
Juan: It's okay. It's okay. You've been given permission by the one and only Juan Mendoza. You've been given permission, there you go. But if we were having this conversation three years ago, Jacqueline, we would be talking about the metaverse. And maybe Ben's question would be something "the metaverse is coming, how can I, you know?"
Jacqueline: There's only a few people who would be talking about that, let's be honest.
Juan: Yeah, yeah, that's what I mean, is that ignoring the metaverse would have actually been an advantage, you know? So the same thing with AI: look at the—find one thing that is going to drive substantial revenue and opportunity for your business, focus on that. And to the detriment of everything else, yes, you'll need to take some bets, yes there's some exploration there, but if the answer is not much, ignore it. It's totally okay.
Jacqueline: And just to—to belabor the point a little bit, AI is a bubble. Whether it is short-term, long-term, it's never going away. However, just like the dot-com bubble, almost every company you've ever heard of, they went out of business. Only a handful survived. That's what's happening right now in AI. Everyone is in their one-year POC, if they're lucky they get two years and they still haven't returned investment on any of the implementations, the platforms, you name it. So it is all just everything will be fine. We just gotta stay calm, curious, but calm, and also to Juan's point: look where the money is and where it's going and where your customers are actually happiest, and that's where you can invest the most.
Juan: And the beautiful thing, just to end, is that if you're a marketer right now working for an enterprise brand, you can let all your competition to confuse themselves and stumble themselves—stumble over the AI stuff to try and use it. They're going to waste money, time and resources doing that. But if you stay focused on the customer value and—and the things that actually going to drive the business forward, this is a great opportunity to distract your competition, you know? So let your competition, you know, confuse themselves with AI and things that they should be trying and experimenting with while we—you continue to focus on customer value. That's the big opportunity here is let everyone else be distracted while you're focusing on the things that are growing.
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Closing
Jacqueline: If you would like your question featured just like Ben's, please go to our subreddit MSOM podcast, submit your question there and you might get featured along here if you've got questions in the space. And with that, Juan—
Juan: Thank you so much for joining us for the first official Office Hours of Making Sense of Martech podcast. Catch me and Jacqueline every two weeks where we dissect and discuss everything that's going on in Martech. Next week will be a—an exclusive interview with a marketing technology executive, would love to have you there. But if you'd like to learn more, you can check us out TheMartechWeekly.com, you can subscribe for updates, and we'd love to see you next time. Stay curious.
Jacqueline: Thanks so much!