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We're going down the rabbit hole together in this week's first The Breakdown episode, part 1. Part 2 will be out shortly.
We'll be back to regularly scheduled programming next week with a great conversation with someone in the Hot Seat.
We'll be back to regularly scheduled programming next week with a great conversation with someone in the Hot Seat.
Think Black Mirror meets Midsommar, set at a wildflower farm. Literally. πΈπΌπ±πΊπͺ»πππ»π·πΏ
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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 β and we're here to deliver it.
00;00;01;14 - 00;00;19;12
Speaker 1
Hi everyone! This week's episode of Making Sense of MarTech is going to be a bit different. We're going down the rabbit hole together and we'll be back to regularly scheduled programing next week. The great conversation with someone in the hot seat. But this content was just too timely to wait. So today's a little bit of a different format.
00;00;19;15 - 00;00;50;12
Speaker 1
I felt compelled to write an essay and get on all of my frustrated thoughts. Think Black Mirror meets Midsommar. Set at a wildflower farm. Literally. All feedback is welcome. And so here is my audio essay. Touch grass. What OpenAI summer camp actually sold us. Welcome to the dystopia. It comes with a gift bag, specifically a jar of open AI branded honey and a canvas tote to carry it home in somewhere between a beekeeping workshop and a lunch and learn on ChatGPT work.
00;00;50;14 - 00;01;16;10
Speaker 1
A group of influencers walked away with both a luxury resort in the Hudson Valley, all while the company that made them is finalizing a $500 billion data center deal in Ohio. I really didn't have to reach for that metaphor. It arrived prepackaged, branded, and gift wrapped. What actually happened? OpenAI hosted its first influencer brand trip over the weekend, a two day retreat and Wildflower Farms called Summer club, sometimes referred to a summer camp room.
00;01;16;11 - 00;01;49;25
Speaker 1
Their range from 2008, even a $5,000 figure that was going viral. But a handful of creators were flown in for farm to table dinners, wellness activities, a painting workshop and hands on sessions about ChatGPT work. OpenAI's new workplace tool. The videos were soft, sunlit, esthetic. Ethereal, whimsical. However, the comments and feedback were not. One creator was asked, more or less correctly, whether she could reconcile a luxury suite with the environmental cost of the data centers running the tool.
00;01;49;26 - 00;02;11;27
Speaker 1
She was there to promote. Another got a sarcastic invitation to film. I get ready with me at a data center next time. A third quietly deleted her post while leaving the rest of her feet untouched. This is not an accident. These are the towels. The word that kept showing up across these platforms was greenwashing. Commenters using it specifically, not just in a generally annoyed sense.
00;02;12;00 - 00;02;35;10
Speaker 1
Journalist Taylor Lorenz put it more bluntly on X. Creators attending the event were getting canceled. Even our Redditor summed up the whole weekend to a single line. This is the proper context. To use the word dystopian, and this Redditor is not wrong. He just happened to be the first one to say. OpenAI's spokesperson called it an education led event, a chance for creators to get hands on with the tools so they could demonstrate them to their audiences.
00;02;35;13 - 00;02;56;25
Speaker 1
One influencer, completely blindsided by the response, wrote on LinkedIn that she never considered the trip would be controversial. She thought people would want the behind the scenes tips that gap between what OpenAI thought it was selling and what the internet decided it was buying is the whole story. Nobody asked the reporters, say what you want about we work's excesses, and there's plenty to say.
00;02;56;27 - 00;03;17;06
Speaker 1
But reporters were in the room when Adam Newman held court. Journalists were credentialed, badge and close enough to ask uncomfortable questions on the record. The mythology got built in public, which meant it also got punctured in public. And that's how we ended up with all the documentaries, the podcast, the mini series. The excess was witnessed by people whose job was to write it down accurately, not just prettily.
00;03;17;13 - 00;03;40;17
Speaker 1
And having been an attendee. A significant portion of those events, including the aforementioned summer camp. There's such fascinating parallels this time. This is not what happened at Wildflower Farms. This wasn't covered by journalist. It was covered by the attendees filming their own experiences for their own feeds, with editorial control that began and ended with themselves. Nobody in the room was obligated to print the awkward answer if they got one.
00;03;40;19 - 00;03;58;11
Speaker 1
Did they even ask those questions? Remains to be seen. The opacity didn't end when the weekend did business insider reached out afterward and got nothing. None of the creators contacted, responded to requests for comment and open. I wouldn't say whether attendees were paid or their travel and lodging were covered, and whether posting was ever expected as part of the deal.
00;03;58;13 - 00;04;20;07
Speaker 1
Those are still the most basic disclosure questions a brain trip generates, and the company that hosted it chose silence and all three after the fact. Once the cameras were off and the only people asking were people, it didn't need to keep happening. That said, there is some written proof that it was all expenses paid. A vet TBD on what all of those expenses were.
00;04;20;13 - 00;04;41;07
Speaker 1
However, an influencer trip is not journalism, and creators aren't failing at a job they never signed up for. But when a company's entire creator strategy is built on handing people a feeling instead of an argument on security, proximity instead of scrutiny, the absence of anyone in power to ask why, though, isn't incidental. This is the purpose. The strategy.
00;04;41;07 - 00;05;00;18
Speaker 1
It's their decision. It isn't incidental. You don't invite people who ask hard questions to an event built to generate soft content. This is the brief. That is what they wanted and is not an oversight. Control. Who's in the room in control? What gets said about the room? Famously, we were lost that control when went public and had to open its books.
00;05;00;21 - 00;05;19;19
Speaker 1
OpenAI hasn't had to yet, but we can filtered entirely through people financially incentivized to have a good time, followed by silence when the actual disclosure questions came in is what the controlling narrative looks like when you've learned from the last guys mistakes. We've seen this movie. None of this is new. Never. I think this world crossover was going to happen.
00;05;19;24 - 00;05;43;02
Speaker 1
But she then flew influencers to China to tour factories while facing ongoing scrutiny over labor practices. And every AI lab is doing some version of this. Anthropic is no stranger. They've been hosting influencer dinners for clod, Microsoft Pilot, of course, creators of the Super Bowl. But none of these examples of company led events group to the white House.
00;05;43;04 - 00;06;05;06
Speaker 1
So why did this one land differently? Definitely timing. Opening AI is mid negotiation on the Ohio data center and sitting on a $200 million Department of Defense contract. Both of these showed up unprompted in the comments. Of course, people aren't just annoyed by the nice hotel room any. They're doing the math on what the hotel room costs somewhere else, and water and electricity and a grid that's already strained.
00;06;05;08 - 00;06;24;25
Speaker 1
Sam Altman himself admitted the temperature has changed at BlackRock's U.S. infrastructure summit. He said I isn't very popular right now, and that data centers are getting blamed for price hikes that companies doing layoffs blame AI whether or not AI is actually the cause. Guys, this isn't a journalist. This isn't a critique. This is the actual CEO reading the room out loud.
00;06;24;27 - 00;06;44;14
Speaker 1
But then sending influencers to a spa. Anyway, this leads me to the we work of it all. So about a year ago draw Pollack made the structural case that we work bought long leases and sold short ones, and the gap between what it spent and what it made never close before the market stopped leading the story. Opening eyes version of that gap is R&D.
00;06;44;17 - 00;07;05;00
Speaker 1
Billions spent building models that go out of date almost as fast as they ship in a field where users can switch to a competitor with less friction than breaking a lease. Paul Eggs breed is that open? AI is probably worse than we work. With one narrow exception if the technology produces a genuine breakthrough, the payoff could be bigger than the real estate ever was.
00;07;05;03 - 00;07;29;26
Speaker 1
And that's a big if. So here's my case. Altman and Neumann have both described themselves something close to godlike in terms. They're not men, just running companies, but they're ushering in this new era, even as their own underlying business turned out to be really expensive and even more fragile. This self mythologizing is what let we get away with elevating the world's consciousness as an actual mission statement while it was subletting desks.
00;07;30;02 - 00;07;54;04
Speaker 1
Yes, I was there when it was happening. We were all just as confused as you were on the inside, and oftentimes we learned it as you were learning it on the outside as well. The term summer camp, the actual name OpenAI used unprompted for its own event as Newman's Playbook, awaiting his own documentary, an Apple TV series. Let's talk about the part that few are saying about the backlash has not been evenly distributed.
00;07;54;06 - 00;08;14;00
Speaker 1
The men who attended got comments like, hell yeah, bro. The women have been getting interrogated about their morals, their awareness, their soul, whether they sold it for a nice hotel room. Every attendee deserves scrutiny. Full stop. Nobody should get a pass for attaching their name to this. But the shape of that scrutiny broke down along the lines that are hard to ignore.
00;08;14;01 - 00;08;37;17
Speaker 1
Is that sharper? Built in skepticism, structural exclusion from the rooms where these tools get normalized. The boardrooms, the term sheets, the move fast cultures and have historically had one demographic doing most of the moving. I see this pattern, and then the pattern has a longer history than just one brand trick. So of course, by default a female voice assistants have women's voices because they read as more trustworthy, more helpful, less threatening.
00;08;37;19 - 00;08;58;02
Speaker 1
Campaigns built around getting women into AI. Framed as a feminist milestone rather than product pushes have been happening for the past few months. Even Reese Witherspoon spent a week fronting exactly this, a post declaring that women's jobs are three times more likely to be automated, and that women use AI 25% less than men, rapt in language of catching up before it's too late.
00;08;58;04 - 00;09;21;06
Speaker 1
And fortunately, the backlash was pretty immediate, and people accused her of running a paid ad disguised as advocacy, and she did deny publicly that she was being compensated. Kylie Jenner smartglasses meta. Same playbook. Women are recruited again and again as the warm welcome for a technology whose actual cost displaced labor worked. Incentives extracted water and power land on everyone, regardless of who did the inviting.
00;09;21;06 - 00;09;39;01
Speaker 1
Put a woman's face and voice on the thing you're worried people won't trust, and you outsource the trust building without changing anything about what's being built. This pattern has a paper trail. Marketers should be honest enough to name it when we see it happening in real time, especially when we're the ones capable of building the campaigns ourselves. So what is this exactly?
00;09;39;04 - 00;10;04;03
Speaker 1
Stripping away the honey and the beekeeping and what's left is a really familiar shape. A company running low on organic goodwill. Buying some and trying to buy some at retail prices. What's new is the mismatch at scale. This industry is currently reordering the electrical grid, the labor market and the information ecosystem, sending creators out to assure the public that it's all fine and actually look, look how nice my dinner is.
00;10;04;03 - 00;10;28;16
Speaker 1
And these s'mores are under candle lights and stars. The notification with a one off itinerary. It's really the timing of thought leadership. There's a term that has recently entered into the clinical and media vocabulary this past year AI psychosis. An informal non diagnostic label. Doctors and reporters are using for delusion like thinking that can emerge in individual heavy users of chat bots under specific and fairly rare conditions.
00;10;28;18 - 00;10;58;10
Speaker 1
And I want to be precise about that because it's not mine to apply to anyone in the story. And I'm not diagnosing the influencers, commenters, or anyone with a condition they haven't claimed. But the phrases useful as a mirror held up to the industry's own language, not any one person's mind. An industry whose CEO compares his product to a wealth fountain and a new era for humanity, whose marketing strategy is to manufacture an oasis and film it as proof of goodness, is exactly the kind of reality distortion the clinical term describes.
00;10;58;15 - 00;11;19;20
Speaker 1
Individual level just scaled up to a boardroom, a keynote. A name like summer camp. Interesting. Doesn't have a psychosis. It has a marketing budget. Doing the same job and making the story feel truer than the balance sheet. And the thing about a genuinely great product, it doesn't need this. It doesn't need a luxury retreat to manufactured affection. It earns affection by working.
00;11;19;22 - 00;11;38;27
Speaker 1
The fact that OpenAI I reached for summer camp tells you something about how confident they actually are and what they're selling. So where do I land in all this? I don't think the influencers who went are uniquely bad people. Most of us would love shake a free weekend. And this isn't meant to be an indictment, but it's the indictment is what happens after the fact.
00;11;38;29 - 00;12;04;01
Speaker 1
Whether you can hold the trip and the truth about what's in service of the same hand, or whether you're pretending the unrelated several of these creators have faced pointed questions, responded with confusion, as if they were. The backlash were the surprising part, rather than a predictable consequence of attaching your name to an industry currently being blamed by its own CEO for rising electricity bills and disappearing jobs.
00;12;04;03 - 00;12;24;02
Speaker 1
Shame isn't the answer. Threats are never the answer, but neither is faux bewilderment. You don't get to take the trip, the the trip and act shocked that people have questions about the trip. For those of us who build campaigns instead of starring in them, there's a sharper version of this lesson. Experiential marketing works because it manufacturers a feeling and lets the feeling do the arguing.
00;12;24;02 - 00;12;47;13
Speaker 1
A spec sheet can't. That's fine when the product is makeup or shoes. It stops being fine when the category is already under public scrutiny for its labor impact, its environmental footprint, and its effect on the information people consume. If your brief requires picking creators specifically because they won't ask hard questions, that's not a creator strategy. That's a tell about what you're actually avoiding.
00;12;47;15 - 00;13;10;15
Speaker 1
The tools are genuinely useful. I use them, I don't use it personally, but I use I and you're reading commentary sharpened by one right now as a gut check. And that's precisely why marketing around them deserves more scrutiny, not less, because stakes of getting the story from aren't hypothetical anymore. The showing up on people's power bills and their job postings, and whose voice gets news to sell.
00;13;10;17 - 00;13;26;25
Speaker 1
The difference? Maybe I'll touch grass and then ask harder questions. Thanks for tuning into making Sense of my. See you next time. A special thank you to Christine Murtaugh, who added this episode, and an extra special thank you to Jenna Carter for believing this passion project means business. Stay curious.