Stop Marketing Like It’s 1999

Jim Marous (00:12):

Hello and welcome to Banking Transformed, the top podcast in retail banking. I'm your host, Jim Marous. In an evolving banking ecosystem, CMOs much approach AI as a transformative force while avoiding the pitfalls of short-term thinking. To drive differentiation, forward thinking marketers must leverage first party data, AI tools, and human creativity to move beyond marketing like it was done in 1999.

Jim Marous (00:43):

On today's episode of Banking Transformed, my friend Eric Fulwiler, who's the co-founder and CEO of the marketing consultancy, Rival, joins me to discuss how true marketing innovation will come not from AI tools themselves, but from proprietary customer insights and creative applications of AI outputs.

Jim Marous (01:05):

Eric will also share practical frameworks for CMOs to evaluate AI investments, build team capabilities, and maintain a strategic perspective amid rapid change. Most importantly, he's going to give insights on how to stay at top of the game in the AI world.

Jim Marous (01:25):

If you don't already know this, Eric Fulwiler has been a guest on our show before. He will also be at this year's Financial Brand Forum where he'll be interviewing CMOs from across the country on what the role of the CMO is today in financial services industry. His sessions are always highest rated sessions at our event, and he has already been invited back more than once to be at our show.

Jim Marous (01:52):

So, Eric, welcome back to Banking Transformed Podcast. Before we start, and I know you've done this before, could you share a little bit about yourself and your agency for those who are listening who may not be aware of who you are?

Eric Fulwiler (02:04):

Of course. Well, Jim, thank you so much for having me, always a pleasure and really looking forward to the forum in a couple weeks. So, I'm Eric, I'm co-founder and CEO here at Rival. We are a boutique marketing consultancy that is focused on understanding what challenger brands, so disruptors within a category or established businesses that are thinking and acting like disruptors to themselves before somebody else does.

Eric Fulwiler (02:29):

What they're doing differently from a marketing perspective to really deliver outsize impact in the approach in the investments that they make in marketing. So, the work that we do is either with late-stage challenger brands like Oura Ring, Webflow, et cetera, or bigger businesses across category like JP Morgan, Unilever, Reebok, et cetera, to really help them bring the challenger playbook to life in the marketing activity and investments that they do.

Jim Marous (02:56):

So, Eric, you've written an article for The Financial Brand that compares the current AI revolution to the internet of 1999. What similarities and differences do you see between these major transformations specifically for CMOs, especially within financial services organizations?

Eric Fulwiler (03:16):

So, I think, it's not too hard to draw this correlation because essentially it is the disruption cycle just being played out in a different way. So, the disruption cycle, if you're not familiar with it, there is a hype bubble in the beginning, then you go down what's called the trough of disillusionment, and then you end up on the slope of enlightenment to eventually what the future state is going to be of any new technology or any disruption within an industry.

Eric Fulwiler (03:45):

And I think the thing for me and the connection to the internet in 1999 and why I think that's helpful for people to think about, so much of the conversation really, it's dominated right now by elevated expectations and personally, I think unrealistic expectations within this hype bubble that we are in when it comes to AI in the world of marketing.

Eric Fulwiler (04:08):

That bubble will burst because history repeats itself, these are social economic cycles that are just driven by human nature which has not changed in the last 20 years. And I think a lot of businesses are going to get caught by investing in short-term shiny objects around AI instead of thinking about fundamentally, what is this going to do to my business, my customers, my members, and my industry overall.

Eric Fulwiler (04:36):

So, for me, and what we're working with clients on is what does the future state 10 years from now look like as opposed to the next 12 months? And so, if you think about the internet, the analogy that I'll use is you don't want to be a Pets.com in 1999. You want to be an Amazon, you want to be a business that is built on what AI is going to do to disrupt the marketing industry over the next 10 years, not just chasing the hype cycle that everybody else is doing over the next 12 months.

Jim Marous (05:04):

It's interesting, you look at what's going on right now, and you describe that most marketers today are still playing checkers with AI while the winners are playing chess and I'd go as far as the state three-dimensional chess. We're both fans of Raja Rajamannar, the marketing director for MasterCard and his book Quantum Marketing.

Jim Marous (05:27):

And it's interesting because when you look at that, how do you look at what an CMO has to do today holding onto some of the fundamentals but also thinking strategically about how AI can enhance what they're doing for the consumer and for other companies or other players within their organization.

Eric Fulwiler (05:49):

So, I think, I always go back to first principles, whether it's marketing, whether it's product, all growth comes from being able to add differentiated value to the end customer, the end consumer, the end member.

Eric Fulwiler (06:01):

And right now, I feel like so many CMOs in this category, but also in others, are focused on the internal dynamics, the career dynamics of we need to be doing something with AI, what is it as opposed to what is the value that it is actually creating for the end customer?

Eric Fulwiler (06:20):

And it's about the 10 years, not the one year that will be there. Fundamentally, I'm not an AI skeptic, I believe this will be the most transformative technology that our industry and probably the world has ever seen.

Eric Fulwiler (06:31):

But sometimes I feel like it's kind of like an emperor's no clothes situation, I feel like everybody in the industry is talking about these amazing things that AI and ChatGPT and LLMs are doing within the marketing world right now and don't get me wrong, a lot of those things are happening and by the way, they've been happening for a lot longer than the last couple years since ChatGPT burst on the scene and created this bubble.

Eric Fulwiler (06:53):

But when I use it, when I use a lot of these technologies, it makes good easy is how I think about it. If you don't know anything about something, if you're kind of like an intern or a junior marketer level, it's going to replace a lot of the stuff that you would do.

Eric Fulwiler (07:07):

But if you're CMO, and if you are a business and a brand that wants to be differentiated, that wants to be ahead of the curve, that wants to be leading within your industry and against your competitors from a marketing perspective, right now, a lot of the AI technology especially around LLMs, does not do great and it certainly doesn't do differentiated.

Eric Fulwiler (07:29):

And just to go on a tangent with that, if you actually look at because I think a lot of people, and this happens with new technology, everybody reads the headlines, nobody actually really understands how the technology works and I'm not an engineer, I'm not a large language model expert, but I've done a little bit of homework on it.

Eric Fulwiler (07:46):

And even without the technical understanding, if you understand what these LLMs are doing, if we just focus on that as one dimension but a pretty big dimension in terms of how it's dominating the conversation around AI and marketing right now, they are fundamentally statistical prediction machines.

Eric Fulwiler (08:02):

You ask it for something and it looks at all the data that has been trained on, as well as the context from human beings to say, here's the most likely thing and the most likely thing to make you happy these applications are designed to make the user happy. And so, if you think about that for a second, it's telling you what it thinks you want to hear and also it's giving you similar answers to what has come before in your industry.

Eric Fulwiler (08:31):

And for us, all the research that we've done on challenger brands, there's a whole framework, there's a bunch of different white papers and stuff that we put out on it but really at the foundation of what our challenger brand's doing differently, it's their differentiated within their category. And so, if everybody is using the same tools, which is trained on the same data and getting similar answers, how is that helping you to be differentiated in what you do in marketing?

Eric Fulwiler (08:57):

And so, back to your question of what should CMOs actually do? The first thing is perspective. I think most CMOs and most businesses need to take the 10-year perspective instead of the 12-month perspective.

Eric Fulwiler (09:08):

And then really, the chess checkers, I like the 3D chess analogy, but the other one that I use when it comes to what do we actually need to do differently right now is it's more of a marathon than it is a sprint.

Eric Fulwiler (09:23):

Everybody is sprinting out of the gate to try to be the first to do something, to use the newest technology whereas actually what we need to be doing is slow, steady, get in shape, personally, your team, your tech stack for what the change is going to be over the next 10 years. And really the AI technology, I think of, and I think more businesses should be thinking of as the middle layer, it is not a silver bullet, it's not going to solve everything.

Eric Fulwiler (09:50):

And really what it does is it is only as good as the data foundation underneath it, which most businesses and most banks and credit unions, there's probably room for improvement within most of them on how they're collecting, how they're storing, how they're cleansing, how they're drawing insights out of customer data then you layer the AI technology on top of that. But then the most important thing is who are the human beings, the talent, the creativity that is using that technology to come up with differentiated ideas and differentiated output.

Jim Marous (10:21):

So, you referenced, and you're referencing it already, the three layer model of first party data, AI or a large learning models and human creativity and you talk about the fact that it provides a framework for marketing of the future. How should CMOs, and I'm sure it's different for every organization based on where they are today, but how should CMOs allocate resources across these three layers to maximize the impact today?

Eric Fulwiler (10:50):

So, I mentioned before we press record, but I'll repeat it now because I think it'll be relevant for the answer to this question. We are finishing up — well, actually we finished the research, we're in post-production now on a short documentary about the future of the CMO role.

Eric Fulwiler (11:05):

So, we interviewed Raja for MasterCard, we interviewed a bunch of current and ex CMOs as well as venture capital, private equity, industry bodies to try to get a 360 perspective on if you throw out all those stats around how the CMO role is the shortest tenure within the C-suite, only 2% of fortune 500s have CMOs on the board, all that stuff, why is that the case and what actually needs to change?

Eric Fulwiler (11:31):

And the short version, although hopefully everybody will go watch the clip, the short version is that there's really three things the CMOs of today in the future in order to be effective in their role, need to first and foremost be able to speak the language of the board, not marketing speak, business and commercial speak at the board level, secondly, they need to own and consistently deliver commercial results.

Eric Fulwiler (11:57):

One of my biggest pet peeves in our industry is what I call marketing for the sake of marketing. When people ask me, "What do you think of this campaign?" "I don't know." "What are the results that it delivered?" "It doesn't matter." Marketing is a means to an end and CMOs need to own and deliver the commercial results at the end of the day.

Eric Fulwiler (12:13):

But the third piece of it is data and technology of which AI, of course, goes into that bucket. And what they need to do, back to my marathon example, is they need to take the 10-year approach and they need to get in shape right now. So, for me and Jim, I was going to mention this at The Financial Brand Forum in my talk, but I'll mention it here now.

Eric Fulwiler (12:34):

Seeing you talk at The Financial Brand Forum last year, and I'm guessing this is something you say in a lot of your talks, but you give your story about how you kind of created your brand and the podcast and all the content that you've done because you were sitting there and you were like … and maybe I'm butchering this story, but this is what I took away from it.

Eric Fulwiler (12:50):

You were like, "Oh, everything is changing. I'm either going to get left behind or I'm going to be part of that change." And it was that talk that was like, "Well, what does that mean for me?" And of course, what it means for me as the CEO of marketing consultancy and someone who is previously a CMO maybe will be a CMO again in the future, it is data and technology and AI.

Eric Fulwiler (13:11):

So, since that point, I have spent 30 minutes every working day just getting a taste of the tools that are out there, playing around with them, trying to do my job with them and actually, it's like most things, I don't think the answer is complicated but it is hard to do consistently over time.

Eric Fulwiler (13:27):

But that’s really where it starts, is you need to start prioritizing this to get a first party expert understanding of this technology and what it means within your business and broaden the lens. It's not just about ChatGPT and LLMs, it is about the data layer, the tech layer and also the human and talent layer on top of it and what you can do to create a whole that's greater than the sum of its parts with talent and technology together.

Jim Marous (13:54):

You talk about the talent technology, you talk about the ongoing learning process and it's interesting, we've talked about this before, we both started days very similarly. We look and say, "Number one, what's happened since yesterday in the whole AI world?" I mean, I get something that actually is, I think the title of the email every day is what happened in AI yesterday? I warned, this happened. What's happened in Google yesterday?

Jim Marous (14:18):

Because just to understand those things is ever changing and this week, they talked about some of the tools out there, the ChatGPT now being able to develop pictures out of everything that's being done. It's insane and there's so many different elements that are happening across different brands and where they're emphasizing things just to stay up with that is an effort of itself without even deploying it.

Jim Marous (14:45):

So, with that said, looking at the talent, not only the talent of the CMO, but the talent of their teams, what team structures or talent strategies do you recommend CMOs implement to build? And it may be not an AI ready but a future ready marketing organization given what's going on.

Jim Marous (15:07):

I know myself, I'm telling people every day that while you go to university for four years, and you may graduate with a marketing degree, that marketing degree is only as current as yesterday and you've got to continually evolve because it is not like you have to know those things, but you have to know how to deploy them for the future. What structures and what talent strategy are you seeing the most progressive marketing organizations doing to simply keep pace of what's going on?

Eric Fulwiler (15:40):

So, the first thing I'll say to your point of it's so hard to stay up to speed, we're all in the same boat. And actually, if you just do more than none, if you do five minutes a day of playing around with the tools, just learning about it, listening to podcasts, reading up, you're already ahead of probably 90% of the industry. And by the way, yeah, I don't want to come across as too cynical, but man, there are so many "AI experts" out there, individuals, agencies, consultancies, that is just not the case.

Eric Fulwiler (16:14):

Again, if you were there for the dot-com bubble and burst, if you were there for the Web 2.0 bubble and burst, there are of course legitimate business people and marketers that are learning this stuff but I think you just got to be a little bit careful on that front and that probably segues into how I'd answer your question about the team.

Eric Fulwiler (16:35):

So, I think the first thing is doing a bit of an honest audit and assessment of yourself as CMO but also your team internally. And if we take data and technology together because I do think they should be taken together, what is the balance of your team? What should it be both based on whether or not you believe the things I'm saying, and other people are saying in the industry about how important this stuff is going to be, but also what kind of organization are you?

Eric Fulwiler (17:01):

I've done 150 interviews of our CMO podcast, everyone from Raja at MasterCard, all the way down to two-person startups just to kind of understand what businesses and CMOs are doing differently and there's no single answer of this is how you need to grow a business.

Eric Fulwiler (17:17):

If we oversimplify it for a minute, there are plenty of success stories that have been art, creative brand led in how they grow and there are plenty of success stories that have been math, quant, science, data in how they grow but the answer of what is going to be best is going to be both to a certain degree.

Eric Fulwiler (17:39):

And so, if you audit your team and you're like, "Oh, we're really deficient on this side, on the data and technology side," then you either got to train up your team, the capability building aspect of it but I would also argue just find a way to get that talent on board. Go hire somebody, get a partner who can help you start to think about that but again, to my point of more than none that's really where you need to start.

Eric Fulwiler (18:04):

And to that I think that how we talk about Rival because clients we're in the hype cycle just like anybody else, we're not approaching it the same way. But we get asked by clients, we're having some fundraising conversations, we get asked by investors like, "What's your approach to AI?" And I go into the spiel and all that stuff.

Eric Fulwiler (18:21):

But how we answer it is like, "Look, just like the web, just like social media, just like any technology that you take, the future state is not going to be that AI sits on its own and you have an AI person, it's just like you used to have a social media person and now it's just the way you do marketing. You used to have a web person, and it was the way you did marketing. You used to have TV people. There used to be TV departments within advertising agencies." It's the same cycle played out.

Eric Fulwiler (18:48):

So, it is about how can you get to that future state of what I call and what we call ourself at Rival as AI native talent. We're just using it in everything that we do. It is not a siloed specialty. So, that's the other way that I would think about it and the businesses that I think are doing it really well is it's easier to move faster by saying, "We're going to hire an AI consultancy, we're going to hire an AI person," but really you need to think about how do you build that AI native layer across the talent in and around you both internally and in your partner group.

Jim Marous (19:18):

It's interesting, we interviewed Leda Glyptis few weeks ago and she talked about the importance of your tribe and what she referenced that as being the people that surround you, that help round out who you are as a person, as a professional, as an advanced thinker, that you can't own it all, you just can't put in your own brain but who can you reach out to help you fit those roles?

Jim Marous (19:47):

You Eric, you and I are not going to be the data experts. So, people that can actually do the coding and all that things, but I think on the ongoing learning process, we're learning that now, we're moving to a time when it's not the answers that are going to win today, it's those that can ask the right questions, it's the prompts. As we see at ChatGPT, you get better and better as you get better and better at prompting not necessarily knowing the answers.

Jim Marous (20:15):

I tell people there's no excuse for writer's block or thought block anymore because you have something you can ask in the marketplace that's going to give you response that should at least trigger something. But if it's not something you can fulfill, make sure you have the tribe around you that will help round out the corners of what you don't know but you have to take responsibility.

Jim Marous (20:39):

You can't put it into a category saying, "I'm just not going to learn this," because I think we're going to discuss a little bit later is that many marketers today are all of a sudden being surprised that they're being let go and they're not prepared for that. And I think sometimes you need to look in the mirror and be honest saying, "Am I ready for the future?" I mean, it sounds like a real basic question, but you got to be honest with that answer as well.

Jim Marous (21:05):

So, you talked about it earlier that the quick AI wins versus the long-term brand building and marketing building, how do you advise CMOs to balance those quick wins with those long-term initiatives? Are there any certain marketing functions where you believe CMOs should be either accelerating or decelerating their overall initiatives?

Eric Fulwiler (21:31):

So, I'll just say quickly to your point about being ready for the future, that was the other thought that occurred to me after hearing you talk last year because I was like a lot of my career, I think we all like to undervalue the role of luck within whatever we're able to accomplish or at least I believe that.

Eric Fulwiler (21:49):

And I was really lucky, I met a guy named Gary Vaynerchuk in 2009 who was starting an agency, and I was like, "I don't know what that is, but sure," and then all of a sudden, I'm riding this wave of Web 2.0 and that's kind of turned into my career. I was in the right place at the right time with that stuff and like put in the work and all that stuff, but still.

Eric Fulwiler (22:07):

And so, I was like, "Who is the me right now? Who's in the right place at the right time?" And it's probably somebody who is 22 just entering the workforce. They're only going to know marketing and the world of marketing with AI and I don't want to get left behind. I went off on a tangent, sorry Jim, I forget your question.

Jim Marous (22:30):

No, I was just asking about the quick AI wins versus the long-term and how should CMOs be accelerating or decelerating some of their current marketing or AI initiatives even?

Eric Fulwiler (22:45):

Yeah, so probably not going to be a surprise that I'm going to say you're probably undervaluing the long-term and overvaluing the short-term. But I would say look, I've been a CMO, we work with CMOs, I obviously understand the reality of what I call the work around the work. There's the marketing job that you need to do, then there's also the job you need to do to sell it through and be guided by the board and other stakeholders and investors and all this stuff.

Eric Fulwiler (23:11):

And a lot of them, much like I said about my story about rival and fundraising, and every investor is asking about, "What's our strategy for AI?" You have to be able to do the work around the work as well. So, of course, there is a reality of if you're getting all this pressure, you can stand up and maybe take a couple talking points from this and say it's about the long-term, not the short term, but you're still probably going to have to deliver something.

Eric Fulwiler (23:31):

And I do think there is enough low hanging fruit. I'm not saying that businesses shouldn't be doing anything with AI actually, it's a big part of what we do is working with businesses on what is the big picture, long-term opportunity, but also the risks of AI.

Eric Fulwiler (23:44):

And that is of course something that you can deliver internally. I will say if I look at our business and where we're working with clients right now, what we're looking at and what we're always looking at is where can technology enable effectiveness or efficiency in marketing work that we do?

Eric Fulwiler (24:05):

So, for example, on the creative side, our creative team based in Boston, we have kind of a creative agency production studio type hybrid. They are starting to make a lot of the content that they do, the kind of basic block and tackle content with AI, it is not replacing the creative director who comes up with the ideas or the art designer that makes the visual truly differentiated within the category or the copywriter or anything like that.

Eric Fulwiler (24:31):

But when it comes to, "Hey, we need 80 different variations of this one concept," then we're using AI to make those changes. So, I think like everything, technology, it's like that Marc Andreessen quote "software, what is it changing the world but it's going bottom up".

Eric Fulwiler (24:48):

It's going to be the low-level stuff where you can start to use this technology sooner rather than later but I'll give you another example. There are tremendous inefficiencies in how we do marketing work. And that's the day-to-day of like, to your point, can you use it as a creative thought partner to come up with ideas faster and all that stuff but it's also in bigger things.

Eric Fulwiler (25:08):

We're developing a tool right now around how can we leverage AI to do consumer journey mapping, customer journey mapping, which typically it's going to take six months, going to cost half a million dollars if you use proper agency to do it and basically we're able to do that in about six weeks for a fraction of the cost because we're able to use the data that these AIs have been trained on. But to my point before about the three-layer approach, also first party data from customers to make sure the output of that is differentiated from their competitors.

Eric Fulwiler (25:44):

So, I think to answer your question directly, the first and most important thing is to put more weight on the long-term opportunity and risks and make sure that you are thinking about or to your point of tribe, you have the tribe in and around you to be thinking about this so that you can be Amazon and not Pets.com.

Eric Fulwiler (26:03):

But the second thing is, and especially if you do need to deliver those wins internally, is to look at what are you doing right now or what is your team doing right now or your agency doing right now? And just ask them, "Where can AI deliver effectiveness or efficiency in what we're doing?"

Eric Fulwiler (26:20):

And chances are it's going to be at that bottom of the value chain type of activity, but maybe you'll get lucky and you'll find something like the consumer journey mapping type of approach, which is a pretty big value creation and cost saving if you're able to do things a little bit differently. So, I think it's doing a bit of an audit to understand where can you get started getting started with doing things differently across the team right now.

Jim Marous (26:42):

So, I'm going to get back to you after we take a short break and recognize the sponsor of the podcast. But when we get back, I want to talk to you a little bit more about knowing your destiny, knowing your destination, and also the importance of measurement for the concept of bringing value to the table today, even though you might be working into the long term. So, let's take a short break here.

[Music Playing]

Jim Marous (27:09):

Welcome back, I'm joined today by Eric Fulwiler, co-founder and CEO of the marketing consultancy, Rival. We've been discussing the future of the CMO and how to move beyond being the market of 1999 to maybe being the marketer of 2035.

Jim Marous (27:28):

So, Eric, before we took a break, you were talking about balancing the long and the short term to look at the long winds as part of this. And it's interesting because I think we sometimes skip over a major part of the textbook on this, and that is, number one, marketers have to understand, I believe, their North star.

Jim Marous (27:50):

What is your specific destination that you're trying to reach? What are you specifically trying to do? Because if you make it broad, it will be a non-destination, you'll never get there because you'll never know if you've gotten there.

Jim Marous (28:02):

The other part of that is measuring the impact of what you're doing in a truthful and finance driven way. Because as you talked about the long-term goals, if you are not building short-term metrics that help you get funded for those long-term goals, you're talking dreams and you're getting more and more into the, "Oh geez, we just are an ad group, we're just a cost center."

Jim Marous (28:27):

Those are two elements we don't talk much about but I think when you look at AI, when you look at the power of digital, when you look at the way we're continually getting immediate feedback, how do you see marketers doing at defining their specific North star and being able to set up metrics in the short term that can help measure those long-term goals you were talking about before our break.

Eric Fulwiler (28:55):

That's a big and great question, Jim but first of all, 2035 is the same distance away as 2015, which things like that, I know you see those stats all the time, but it just kind of blows my mind for a second. It's far away-

Jim Marous (29:09):

Which was cut in half by COVID, if you really want to look back at me and it seems like a long time back, but it wasn't that long ago.

Eric Fulwiler (29:14):

Yeah, so I would say to your North star question, I mean, I might not be the best person to answer or maybe I will, I don't know, that's the only way that my brain works. I'm overly rational, potentially maybe a bit on the autistic spectrum and for me it's like, “Well, how do you know what to do if you don't know where you're going?”

Eric Fulwiler (29:35):

And so, this is the part that's maybe helpful for people. Everything that I do for Rival, everything that we do for our clients as part of why we talk about ourself and are a consultancy, is this approach, marketing as a means to an ad as I talked about before. How can we get started telling you what you should be doing with AI or what your strategy should be, or what a great idea would be if we don't know where you as a business are trying to end up. So, it's the only way that my brain works.

Eric Fulwiler (30:01):

And so, for me, you have to start with the end in mind. If my goal is to have a successful company in 10 years, to have opportunities to take a different CMO role in 10 years, I know that I need to learn this stuff and that Rival as a business needs to be ahead of the long-term curve, not the short-term hype bubble curve. So, I think, I would literally try to give people practical advice the way that I do it.

Eric Fulwiler (30:28):

And again, maybe this is overkill but I've got goals for the year, I've got goals for the quarter, I've got goals for the month, I've got goals for the week, and then I just write down the to-dos that need to get done for each of those things and then each day I literally look at the goals of the month and the goals of the week, and I figure out what exactly I need to do.

Eric Fulwiler (30:49):

So, I think you can apply that to AI if you just zoom all the way out and say, "What is the job to be done for AI in my career or for my business?" But I guess it's kind of like a long-winded way of saying that I think that most people who don't end up where they want to go probably don't put enough time and effort and focus into really defining what that is and work backwards on the steps of how to get there so you know where you need to put your foot next.

Eric Fulwiler (31:19):

Your question about the commercials or the KPIs and how do you kind of tie all those things together? So, one, I'll throw a quick thing out that I think might be interesting for people. So, Jim, as you know, I'm a CMO of 11:FS and my approach there and what I believe is the biggest shift in marketing over the last 10 years that most businesses and CMOs have not yet figured out, they might be doing it, but they haven't really landed this perspective that I think could really help people is if marketing is, how do you tell a story to change perception and behavior?

Eric Fulwiler (31:54):

That's so much of what we focus on. What's the strategy? What's the idea? What are the channels? How do I know if it's working or not? But actually, in order to tell somebody a story, you need their attention, and we don't spend enough time thinking about that. So much of what we do as marketers, to be honest, especially within this category, is, hey, if I put an ad out there, somebody's going to see it. It's just not true anymore.

Eric Fulwiler (32:13):

And it's not the way that you should approach things. You should be saying, "How do I put out marketing? How do I put out communication that is going to be so relevant, authentic, and differentiated that it is going to earn the attention to my audience?"

Eric Fulwiler (32:30):

The whole thing about short attention spans, I am not an expert, but I would argue it's not that attention spans have gotten shorter in the last 10 years, it's that people have so much more choice in where to spend their time that if the content is not good, they're not going to watch it. If it's a shitty ad, sorry, if it is not a good ad, they are not going to sit there and take it.

Eric Fulwiler (32:51):

And so, really what that means for me, and back to my background before I went to work for Gary and help build VaynerMedia, I actually started in the world of media at forbes.com. And so, coming from that background, I'm like, well actually, so much of marketing is about thinking and acting like a media company because a media company's business model is attention. How do you attract, retain, and then monetize people's attention?

Eric Fulwiler (33:18):

So, I actually think that CMOs need to be thinking and acting as much like heads of media companies as traditional marketers with the focus being on how do I earn attention and then monetize it through the products that I'm selling.

Eric Fulwiler (33:30):

And to the 11:FS thing, if you take this to the extreme at 11:FS marketing was a revenue center, not a cost center for the business because we built up so much attention with the content and the experiences in the community that we built, that we were able to monetize that through sponsorship like a media company would and cover the costs and then some of the whole marketing activity, which is a similar approach that we're taking here at Rival.

Eric Fulwiler (33:54):

And that's an extreme example, but it is where I think the industry could be going and I'm not saying that a regional bank or a credit union listening to this should all of a sudden say, "Hey, I think marketing can be a revenue center by thinking and acting like a media company," but directionally North star and just from a mindset perspective, I actually do think it's interesting to walk around in that for a minute and think about what it would mean to take that approach within your business.

Jim Marous (34:22):

Boy that's so key though. You're right, the share of attention is a Gary Vaynerchuk thing, it's a 11:FS thing, it's yours and my thing today. But it's interesting because you talk about content, how many financial institutions are creating content that generates interest among your most important customers? How are you getting that share of attention?

Jim Marous (34:43):

I mean, I know of some really, really amazing marketing programs that TD Bank up in Canada's done over the years to get share of attention during holidays or during special events and things that they were known for and built on top of everything else.

Jim Marous (34:59):

Did it generate any concrete revenue in a way that was like, “Oh, these number of accounts got generated because of that?” No. But when you look at share of mind, when you look at the metrics on Google and other places, dimensions and all that, you are realizing you're hitting it and that's what we're trying to do and they are self-funding.

Jim Marous (35:22):

We both are content creators, but at the same time, we're content deliverers, we have agency relationships, we have relationships with clients, we try to build things for them. But I think financial marketers got to ask themselves, "Am I just going through the motions on Twitter and LinkedIn and Instagram, every other platform or am I really developing content that not only reflects my North star, but helps to pay that ROI number and also makes it so my customers really gets to know our differentiation?"

Jim Marous (35:56):

I mean, there's all these things to unpack, but I think we sometimes coast through those things and there's more ability to do it than ever before, you're just not getting there. Eric, you dabble and you work hard with Rival, with your clients, but you also see a lot of things in the marketplace. We talk about it often, we have networks in our platforms that talk about this as an ongoing dialogue. We kid about certain brands, we don't kid about others.

Jim Marous (36:27):

In and out of banking, who do you believe right now is kind of getting how to apply AI and marketing or appears to even without peeling back all the letters levels really seems to be bringing these things together because there aren't that many organizations, but it'd be them big or small, can you give me one or two examples of organizations, as I said, either in or out of banking that really seem to be bringing these things together well?

Eric Fulwiler (36:56):

I can give you two examples, probably one that you've heard of before and one that you might not have. So, the one that you've heard of before, Athletic Greens, so back to everything I was talking about before of you can be brand led or performance led, although I think that's a false dichotomy actually, which something we can come back to if that's of interest.

Eric Fulwiler (37:12):

But essentially you can be more about the idea or you can be more about the numbers and the data and all that stuff. And Athletic Greens is incredibly data performance oriented in what they do, even though they invest a lot in brand level marketing, the approach that they are taking, using AI to really understand the value of the investments that we're making is tremendous and I think that is part of what has powered their growth.

Eric Fulwiler (37:38):

I did an interview for our CMO podcast with a fascinating, early-stage startup out of Montreal, Canada called Mid-Day Squares. They're in the U.S. as well, they sell chocolate, but they have taken the media company approach to the extreme where literally they don't do any marketing and actually in the content they do, they don't even talk about the product. They think of it as building a reality YouTube podcast, multimedia show around what it's like to start and scale and run a startup.

Eric Fulwiler (38:11):

And it is fascinating, and I know from the conversation with Jake, one of the co-founders over there that they're heavily using AI in how they produce and also edit content. So, those are two good examples that you can check out.

Eric Fulwiler (38:25):

But I would say overall, whether it's the big incumbents that are thinking and acting like challengers, like Raja at MasterCard, or whether it is the Mid-Day squares, the super early stage, the Athletic Greens, the more mid stage, they're really taking this approach that I have been really preaching on this whole conversation where think and put more value into the long term, but you just got to get started getting started. You got to find ways to start using it, actually right now, it’s not that it might be hard to figure out, but it’s not that complicated.

Eric Fulwiler (38:56):

And maybe I know that we're coming up on the end, but the way that I would kind of tie it off going back to the marathon and not the sprint metaphor is it's just like anything getting in shape for something physical, you just have to do a little bit consistently over time. No amount of training that you can do in a month is going to get you in shape to run a marathon next month, you need to start doing a little bit consistently over time.

Jim Marous (39:20):

Speaking of that marathon analogy and getting in shape for the marathon, we've talked about it a couple times in this podcast today, the need to dedicate consistent time to learning and testing your skill sets, your personal skill sets as it relates to AI.

Jim Marous (39:36):

You've talked about setting aside a half an hour each day to learn things you don't already know or to practice using AI in different ways. What are two other or one other way a marketing leader can get ready for the future they're unsure of?

Eric Fulwiler (39:54):

Probably a few things. I would say one, we all exist in our own little bubbles, whether we want to admit it or not. And if I apply that just to marketing, the marketing world, LinkedIn, maybe Twitter, podcasts that you listen to, we're all within a certain bubble, step outside of that bubble and go listen to some people who might have a different perspective.

Eric Fulwiler (40:17):

A couple people that I'll throw out there that I listen to Gary Marcus, who's maybe for me even a little bit too much on the spectrum of an AI skeptic, Ethan Mollick, who's a professor at Wharton, he wrote a great book, it's up here on my shelf called Co-Intelligence.

Eric Fulwiler (40:35):

It's probably one of the best easy read, high-level concepts that everybody can understand on AI and how to think about it. So, that would be one is like just step out of your bubble and get different perspectives and maybe listening to this podcast is part of that, but I think that that's really important.

Eric Fulwiler (40:49):

The a little bit every day is probably the most important thing. The other thing I would say is just do the exercise of asking your team for an audit. It doesn't have to be a formal thing, you don't necessarily need a consultant to come in and do it.

Eric Fulwiler (41:01):

Just say, "Hey, I believe this is a marathon with AI. Where are we in terms of our readiness and our fitness to run that marathon? Where are we using it now? Where should we be using it? What should we be doing differently?" Just get started getting started, having those conversations internally.

Eric Fulwiler (41:16):

The other thing that we're doing, we had a partner offsite in Portland, Maine a couple weeks ago, and we said, "Okay, if we we're going to invest X amount in each department strategy, creative production, paid media and customer data and MarTech, two evolve our service offering, because we're mostly a service business at this point to include 20% more AI, what would that look like? What are the tools that we would buy? What are the trainings that we would do for our people?"

Eric Fulwiler (41:44):

So, I guess that can be part of the audit exercise but maybe put aside a little bit of a budget for AI testing, learning internally. So, those are a few that I would throw out there that are literally things you can start doing right now.

Jim Marous (41:59):

Eric, one thing that we always can be sure of when we have a discussion is we're going to go over the time limit every time because there's so much to cover, it's always nice be it right or wrong to discuss things that we both are really aligned with. I'm not sure if that brings too much dynamics where there's arguments going on, there's usually not. We see things from the same lens in many ways, we use different tools to get there.

Jim Marous (42:26):

And for those of you who are listening to the podcasts that are going to be at The Financial Brand Forum, make sure you catch Eric's sessions when he is discussing the role of the CMO, but also just discussing with different CMOs their structure within their organizations, both large and small, they're going to be great sessions.

[Music Playing]

Jim Marous (42:45):

Also, while you're there make sure you pick up one or two of my sessions on the main stage where I'm talking to key players who Eric knows many of them on the executive leadership series. Eric, always a pleasure looking forward to seeing you in Vegas and in Boston next time you come back to the States, so it's always great. Thank you.

Eric Fulwiler (43:05):

Always a pleasure. At some point we need to do a marathon podcast, just a three or four hour one. Finally, talk it all out because we never have enough time.

Jim Marous (43:11):

And bring people in and out because we know who we'd like to bring in.

Eric Fulwiler (43:13):

I'd love that. Tell me, I’ll just do it. Thanks so much.

Jim Marous (43:17):

Thanks Eric, appreciate it. Thanks for listening to Banking Transformed, the winner of three international awards for podcast excellence. If you enjoy what we're doing, please be sure to give Banking Transformed a positive review. Also, be sure to catch my recent articles on The Financial Brand and check out the research you're doing for the Digital Banking Report.

Jim Marous (43:40):

This has been a production of Evergreen Podcasts. A special thank you to our senior producer, Leah Haslage, audio engineer Chris Fafalios and video producer Will Pritts. I'm your host, Jim Marous. Until next time, remember, being a CMO requires a tested tool chest of skills and the willingness to embrace continuous change and learning.