What Marketers Talk About Behind Closed Doors | The Artificial Intelligence Edition | Babs Rangaiah

This episode focuses on the challenges and opportunities faced by Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) regarding artificial intelligence in marketing.

1. AI is revolutionizing marketing, offering unprecedented opportunities for consumer insight and personalization.
2. The shift from third-party cookies demands a robust focus on first-party data collection and analysis.
3. New media platforms are altering traditional marketing strategies, requiring marketers to adapt quickly.
4. Remote work is reshaping team dynamics and necessitating new strategies for collaboration and creativity.
5. CMOs must continuously evolve, embracing curiosity and innovation to leverage AI effectively.

1: Introduction to AI's impact on marketing

Discussion on how AI is influencing marketing strategies and the challenges faced by marketers in adapting to new technologies. Mike Linton: "AI is a red hot topic that keeps on giving."

2: The transformation of media

Exploration of changes in the media landscape and the migration from traditional to new media platforms. Babs Rangaiah: "The 30-second ad doesn’t get the scale it once did."

3: Data management challenges

Insight into the struggles marketers face with data management and the transition to a post-cookie world. Babs Rangaiah: "First-party data capturing is becoming crucial."

4: Remote work and collaboration

Discussion on how remote work models are impacting team collaboration and innovation. Babs Rangaiah: "Finding the right balance in remote work is essential for team effectiveness."

1. Prioritize the acquisition and organization of first-party data.
2. Adapt marketing strategies to include new media channels like TikTok and CTV.
3. Invest in AI and machine learning to enhance consumer targeting and personalization.
4. Develop a remote work model that fosters collaboration and innovation.
5. Continually educate and train teams on the latest digital and AI technologies.

In this episode, "What Marketers Talk About Behind Closed Doors | The Artificial Intelligence Edition," host Mike Linton, a five-time CMO, sits down with the illustrious Babs Rangaiah. Babs, the founder of CCBabs and a CMO Coach, delves deep into the pressing issues keeping today's marketers awake at night.

Key topics include the impact of artificial intelligence on marketing strategies, the transformation of data and martech in a post-cookie world, and the evolving media landscape with platforms like TikTok and CTV. Babs also shares insights from his extensive career, including his work with IBM's Watson and his role in launching Paramount Plus.

Tune in to hear Babs Rangaiah's expert advice on navigating the challenges and opportunities presented by AI, data management, and new media. Learn what top CMOs are saying about the future of marketing and how to stay ahead of the curve in this dynamic industry.

Subscribe to the CMO Confidential Newsletter for exclusive content and stay connected with us on all major podcast platforms. Don't miss out on these invaluable marketing insights!

People

Mike Linton, Babs Rangaiah

Companies

IBM, Adobe

Books

None

Guest Name(s):

Babs Rangaiah

Content Warnings:

None

Mike Linton

The CMO Confidential Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything podcast network looking to launch or scale your podcast? I hear everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit ihereverything.com dot. Welcome to CMO Confidential, the podcast that takes you inside the drama, decisions and choices that go with being the head of marketing.

Babs Rangaiah

Hosted by five times CMO, Mike Linton. Welcome marketers, advertisers and those who love them to chief marketing officer Confidential. CMO Confidential is a program that takes you inside the drama, the decisions and the politics that go with being the head of marketing at any company in what is one of the most scrutinized jobs in the executive suite. I'm Mike Linton, the former chief marketing officer of Best Buy, eBay, Farmers Insurance and Ancestry.com, here today with my guest, Babs Rangaya. Today's topic, what marketers talk about behind closed doors, the artificial Intelligence edition.

Mike Linton

Now, Babs has had a very diverse career. He worked at startups like agency.com comma during the.com boom, led global digital transformation at Unilever, helped launch Paramount plus, and has deep experience working with AI on Watson with IBM. He currently runs his own company called CC. Babs, what a great creative title, which specializes in coaching, digital transformation and marketing. Full disclosure, Babs and I are both CMO coaches and instructors at CMO boot Camp.

He is here today to talk about what stresses out cmos with a special focus on that ongoing red hot topic that keeps on giving artificial intelligence. Welcome, Babs. Thank you. Glad to be here. All right, Babs, give us an overview on what you are hearing from your marketing clients, like what's keeping them up at night?

What do they talk about with you that they don't talk about in public? Yeah, so as you mentioned, I'm an executive coach, so I do get kind of some insights from people that I'm coaching senior marketers that you may not hear on kind of the stages at can and whatnot. So for me, in the last year or so, I think the biggest issues separately from AI, of course, is for a long time it was about the economy and still not completely stable, but for a long time there was a lot of budget cuts and concerns about where the economy was going. But I think the biggest vulnerability that I hear that you really don't hear much about is really in data and Martech and this whole post cookie approach. There's the data, clean rooms and how to organize and capture and harness data is newer.

Give us an overview of the data topic, and then we can drill into the subtopics, which are drilling out, which is the marketer has so much data coming, it's probably not one of the biggest data consumers in the company. Tell us, write the story large, and then give us those subsets you were just talking about, Jeff. Yes. I mean, I think the broader issue is around the cookie deprecation. So this idea that you won't be able to target in the same manner that you have been for the last decade or two in digital is caused kind of a big shift in the way marketers, especially brand type marketers, in how they go about reaching their consumers.

Babs Rangaiah

So there's been a much bigger push towards getting first party data, capturing it, organizing it, and then figuring out a way to harness that. And again, that's not been kind of the primary skill sets or competencies that most cmos have grown up with, especially those who are of a certain age. So I hear beneath that statement fear that I don't know how to do it, and I also don't even know maybe how to rent it or get the right vendor. Is that true? Right.

Well, I mean, I'll give you a great example. So I have a CMO who I'm coaching who, you know, was talking to me about his marketing stack, and, you know, the, they have a line item for Adobe on his budget that came over from it for $50 million. And he literally was like, so, you know, I'm a coach, but I'm also kind of this coach, Coach Sultan, so to speak, for some guys, and they're kind of looking for insights. Also, given that I was in the business for so long and deeply into digital and data and so forth, and he literally had no idea what he was getting for that 50 million. Now, most other areas of marketing, you know, they can cut or move or shift or figure out, you know, what kind of return they're getting.

And even if it's not directly specific returns, they have some sense of what it's for. And in this case, the guy literally was like, you know, he might as well have been photoshopped. Like, he's like, what am I getting from Adobe that costs $50 million? And that's typical of a martex tech when you have all the suppliers there. You know, many of them, you know, they wouldn't have either heard of or unknown much about what value they're adding and why they're using it.

So those kinds of things are really difficult to deal with. And then if you're sitting in that, if you're. Because I'm guessing we have a bunch of listeners that actually wouldn't know what's in the line item or might not. Might not. They just look at that $50 million, which pretty big number.

Mike Linton

And the Martech stack is usually a really big number. Sometimes you even have your own people. What should they do to understand what's in that number without actually, you know. Cause a bunch of people are going to say, oh, my gosh, I don't want to just tell the company, I don't know what's in my $50 line item. I think that's exactly right.

Babs Rangaiah

I think what, you know, there's a number of things, one of which is if you have the confidence, then you obviously could, you know, get details from both your team, your underlings, as well as the suppliers themselves, and get. And try to learn more about, you know, what it is that they're getting and how the whole Martech stack works. I mean, that requires some level of research, curiosity, and time to really spend to understand all that. But some people don't have the time nor the desire nor the ego that allows them to be able to do that. And that's partly why they hire me, actually, they hire coaches for exactly that reason.

But. But I would say beneath that is, you better figure it out one way or the other. Like. Like not knowing is you're going to fall farther and farther behind, because right on the tail of that, you know, we discussed this a little bit. You know, before this recording is, you got everything going on in your media is exploding.

Mike Linton

You got TikTok. You have all these things you have to follow on with and understand, and there's more tools than you can keep track of, much less integrate. So I'm going to wrap up the Martech stack by saying, don't fawn it all off or pawn it all off. Learn how it works. But then let's talk about the other stuff that's coming through your office.

All the different media stuff. Yeah, I mean, so, you know, after the economy and data, I think you're really seeing, trying to get an understanding of the new media landscape, which, you know, with the long and tedious and now precipitous drops, really, in linear television. The 32nd ad really is something that doesn't even get the scale that it once did. And so the advent of CTV TikTok is a huge, you know, kind of channel and media that you really have to understand in today's world, retail, media networks, you know, all of those things are on the minds of marketers and figuring out how to best utilize those as part of their overall channel mix. You know, the other thing is the workforce, you know, post COVID, this whole remote hybrid approach to the office is, you know, is not changing.

Babs Rangaiah

You know, you're not going to get people back in the office five days a week. And there's. There's a real kind of feeling of what is the best option here? What is the best approach? Should it be two days?

Should it be three days? I had ones. You know, I want to go. I want to ask two parts before you move on to this. So what's the answer to number one?

Mike Linton

I got all these new medias, some of which I didn't grow up with, maybe. Yeah. And then we have the remote, the robot work, and let's just throw team collaboration, innovation on those. What should you do if you're in the executive dealing with these two issues? The first, all these exploding medias?

Babs Rangaiah

Yeah. I mean, so look, there's a number of things. I mean, the media thing, I think, is actually, it's positive, it's innovative. It gives you a chance to do some things that for many, many years were impossible to do, whether that's the addressability that comes with CTV ACR kind of technology that really allows you to see who saw an ad and then what action they took. TikTok is maybe the most powerful media we've ever seen in terms of which.

Mike Linton

Might be regulated any minute. Yeah, it might be gone, but for now, it's just one of the most powerful media we've ever known in terms of driving word of mouth and driving sales. Actually, people buy things directly from what they see on TikTok. And the retail media networks are, you know, that is point of purchase to some extent. And you're really looking at combining the abilities of media and in store together in these retail media networks that are all of a sudden becoming some of the biggest players in the game, especially Amazon right there with Facebook and Google and so forth.

What are you telling them? That you should be playing in this as fast as possible or you should rent it or. We haven't even got to the big topic of the day, AI, but we've got, we basically said, look, know your line items, know your new media. And now we have the remote work thing. What should they be doing with remote work?

Because at least my experience is it's in the way of collaboration and innovation for new stuff, not for established stuff. But tell us what, what people are telling you. Well, you know, what I found one of, one of the guys that I coach had a great approach to it because I think there isn't one exact way. I think you have to find out what works best for your organization. There's certainly some benefits, you know, of remote, but I.

Babs Rangaiah

But I think the, you know, there's a lot being missed, especially for younger employees, by not being in an office. I mean, when we were young, you know, we learned from our leaders, right, by watching them. They were right down the hall and right them. How they present, how they, you know, what their presence is, and, you know, how they go about critical thinking, and. You could have coffee with them or lunch and then dissect all meaning.

Mike Linton

That's a lot harder. Walk into the office, right. I mean, there's just a whole bunch of stuff that you're not getting. So there has to be some way of bringing those two things together. And, you know, I think that one guy had a great approach that he.

Babs Rangaiah

Cause a lot of people had moved during COVID So what he does is instead of one or two days in the office, he has a totally remote for three weeks out of every month, and for one week, everybody comes in. So even if you moved, you know, you're not necessarily. You don't have to worry about commuting. If it's only one week a month. You come in, and for that week, you collaborate, you work together.

Everyone's in the office. And then on the Thursday of that week, he actually, all of them go out together that night and, you know, have almost like a, you know, an off site type thing every, you know, once a month. And he's like, I actually got. I get better conversations and have gotten closer to more junior employees in this approach than I ever did by working inside the office. So I think there's different ways.

I think the training has to be more formalized. You know, that's part of why I do these executive presence workshops, because, again, we learned all that just by being around it. And, you know, training in more specific and coaching and more specific, um, uh, skill sets like that, I think are important. So. So what you just said about the one weekend and then the compression of social in one night is, for lack of a better word.

Yeah. Is that a best practice in your mind, given what you've seen? He's had a lot of success with it, I think, for now, because it's got. It's. It's, um.

It's basically solved the issue of the people that have moved without having to make them move back or essentially fire them or have them be 100% remote. It's solved. The issue of some people are in some days, some people are not another day. The true collaboration of working together in an office environment for a full week every month is very much like, you know, the having, you know, being in an office 24, you know, whatever, three. Well, I like that because it compresses all the good stuff.

Mike Linton

Yeah. Everyone is on their a game because that's the one week we're going to do it. Right. Because a lot of people, they come in two day the week, but everyone's still on Zoom because a whole bunch of other people are, you know, not in the office. So you don't really get past this, you know, this kind of Zoom approach.

Babs Rangaiah

And so I think that is something that I see as a best practice because he's had a lot of success with, and people really like it. The employees are happy, he's happy because people are really working together, collaborating live. People are getting to know each other well, and he's getting actually a better connection with his own employees because of the Thursday night, you know, dinner and so forth. And it's super. I like, it's structured.

Mike Linton

It's structured, knowable, planable. I think that is really a good idea. We also are, you know, it's hard not to read the press kind of almost every week or two. We're talking about, you know, sometimes we did a whole show, the best, and it's the best of times, the worst of times for the CMO. It's hard sometimes not to think.

It's still a really tough time for the CMO. We did a show with Seth Matlin. It's probably the hardest job in this season. What are you hearing people talk about behind the scenes of what it's like to be in the job? Well, I mean, that's the other.

Babs Rangaiah

So beyond all the things we talked about, I think their own careers and this concept of the demise of the CMO is something that's obviously on their minds as well. And as we talked about kind of before the call, the CMO role itself is so dramatically different than it was when a lot of the cmos grew up in marketing. Right. There's so many between customer experience and product marketing and creative and now social and pr and consumer and trade events and paid media and earn media and website. And especially now with the new technologies coming in, it's just a different role.

Nobody has expertise in all of that in the way that you used to be able to kind of lead your team because you knew it. You grew up in it. You know, you learn a lot and you're kind of passing that knowledge along as you're also trying to build your business. And I think now we're seeing that that's a, you know, obviously a much more difficult and complex environment. But, you know, it's a different, there's a great, when we came up, the whole, the thing that distinguished people was your iq.

You know, who was smarter, you know, it's like, and then it was, you know, IQ, then EQ. And I think there's a big feeling now that this concept of CQ, right, your curiosity quotient is maybe your most important trait because you're never going to know everything. What you got to be is curious enough to, you know, listen and want to know more and learn more and keep, keep up with things as they're changing so dramatically and so rapidly. And so that's something you need. A super important point.

Mike Linton

We had Jim Stengeline, the former CMO of PNG, and his thing was curiosity. And Seth also, Mantle said this is the most important characteristic you have because you can't keep up with all the tools if you're not going to investigate them personally. That's right. And you can be super smart, but if you're not going to learn new stuff, you're super smart. Run out.

Speaking of which, let's talk about the whole top, the topic of the day, the big topic, artificial intelligence. In addition, all the stuff we just talked about, big data, TikTok, pressure on the job. You're at the forefront of technology, meaning the customer, meaning the company. Now, you put AI in a topic no one can avoid, no matter almost what they're doing, what's happening, and the marketing landscape with AI, and then draw some dimensions. B, two b, B two c.

Like big companies, little companies, tell us what's going on there. Well, so first of all, I think marketers might actually be able to leverage AI more than most other functions of business because at its core, marketing's core activities are really understanding consumer insights, matching them to products and services, and doing that via engaging content to influence and persuade people. Right. So all things that AI, and especially generative AI is made for, the landscape is such that this is going to be something that marketers, if you're on top of it and you're curious and you understand that you could really use as a huge kind of competitive advantage if you're on it and could get killed if you don't. Right.

Babs Rangaiah

That's the kind of thing it has as far as the, you know, as far as the landscape goes, most people aren't doing very much other than, you know, kind of setting themselves up, if they can, and, you know, talking to consultants and talking to companies about what they should be doing today and, you know, starting to do pilots. I think you're not seeing any huge scale transformations yet, but I think you will shortly. The market itself, external, I mean, obviously chat GPT but there's you know, there's so many properties. You know, I was in Silicon Valley a month or so ago, and that's all anyone talks about there. And the amount of money and the frenzy that's going on in the companies that are launching this space is staggering.

It is staggering. But a couple of quick questions. If you're a big company, is it easier for you than if you're a small company to use AI? And then is b two b or b two c more likely to fit AI on the marketing front? I don't know that there's going to be.

So let's think about what AI could be used for in marketing. From a creative standpoint, it's personalization and it's content creation and copywriting, things like that. You need to do both of those things. Whether you're b two b or b two c, both of those things are critical. I think you may be able to see from a b two b standpoint more direct and shorter term benefits from it because it's a smaller audience typically, and there's very specific businesses, especially from an account based standpoint.

You can get information, organize it, and capture it in a way and in a speed that you haven't been able to before and be able to take immediate action on that and automate those things. Consumers, obviously, there's far more consumers than there are businesses, so I think there's that. But broadly, the issues are the same. That's what you're trying to do from a media standpoint, a consumer standpoint, like you're going to media planning, programmatic buying optimization, targeting all those things are things that are going to be significantly changed and improved using automation and artificial intelligence that will probably benefit more than b, two c, consumer b, two c businesses. And then the measurement.

The measurement is, I think the thing that really could shift from this market intelligence, the AI tools that can quickly process and analyze competitor data to identify market trends and opportunities at scale, getting insights, all of those things, I think from a consumer standpoint is going to be huge, but from a business standpoint, I think we'll have a much better chance for you to be able to recognize ROI and where you're closing deals and where you're not. So we've had a couple of guests from particularly big agencies and data, data people, and one of the things they said is if you don't have a good database, if you put AI in a crappy database, you will get really crappy AI. Let's talk about that. How do you know if you have a good database or not? I mean, that's the first thing you have to do when they talk about kind of, you know, what you have to do today to get yourself prepared.

You have to be able to clean your data and, you know if you have good data or if you don't. I mean, for the, if you've been, if data has been an important part of your business for a long time and you've lived and died it or you're direct to consumer type company or an e commerce based company, you're going to have great data because you've been doing for ages. I think the companies that are going to have challenges are the people that have not had to really rely on first party data and clean, polished data because they've gone after mass audiences for so long. So give us an industry that you think will have the hardest time with this. CPG, I think will have a hard time.

Not so much with AI in general, because they also have resources and marketing tends to be a bigger, a lot. Of times at the center of the company. Yeah, it's the leading area of the company. They'll put whatever they have to to get in place, but they won't have the kind of clean, polished, organized data than a lot of companies that, you know, the reliant that already will have. So that'll be a challenge for them.

But I mean, I think, look, when you're talking about what you need to do today to get yourself prepared, data is a piece of it. I think doing pilots is very important. I think getting your sense of how to leverage AI will give you a better understanding of how and the data that you have is going to be impacted and how it can impact what you get out of it. Give us an example of some of the pilots you are seeing that you think are really good uses of AI marketers being on the frontier of AI. Well, so I, yes, this is not my bi, I'm doing a bunch, I work with a company called Traction and instalilly where we're doing, you know, this future proof project where we work with companies to do pilots and essentially education.

And you know, then actually developing a mvp. And there's so many. I mean, there's one we're doing with a. With a celebrity agency where we're helping to, you know, right now, one of the issues with celebrity companies is there. You know, it was great when there were big celebrities, but now influencers are becoming really just as critical and more cost effective and so forth.

But there's millions of them. Millions. So using AI to kind of understand, like, who is best matched to your business, to figure out kind of the right influencers is an opportunity we're working on right now. I mean, there's a number of pilots that people are doing in the personalization space and trying to really figure out how we can get the right message to the right person at the right time. You know, I think, I also worked on Watson for a long time, so I think some of the examples there can be used in generative AI.

Mike Linton

Give us a couple great Watson examples. Well, so, like, for, for the US open, you know, for example, we created a. You know, so normally at the end, you know, there's all different matches going on at the same time, so it's hard to kind of get the highlights from each piece. And we used watts, so you'd have to have a bunch of people. And then it takes tons of time editing.

Babs Rangaiah

And we had Watson create the highlight reel at the end of the day to send up to CB's or whoever's covering the US Open. And Watson can gauge highlights based on when players go like this and when the people clap. Even in its mild form, it can understand what represents the highlights. And then it's much easier to edit because now you've got all this thing that Watson has decided as a highlight, you look at it and within, you know, much shorter periods of time, and you can get that right up to the network. That's a great.

When we created trailers for 20th Century Fox for movies that normally take six months, a bunch of editing, a bunch of people. Right? And same thing, it can check the highlights based on all the other movies that are in that genre and create a movie trailer. But my favorite Watson thing is always the one where they had a big relationship with the Cleveland clinic and really wanted to use Watson for healthcare purposes. But this just showed the power of it to me was they did a pilot with.

They're trying to figure out diseases of people they couldn't solve. And there was a kid who was sick, and he'd been to six doctors over seven or eight months. Nobody could figure out what was wrong with him. I still remained sick. And then we used Watson, and Watson was able to read.

This is the part that I thought was ridiculous. Watson read every New England Journal of Medicine ever written in minutes. Right? Yeah. And then was able to combine that data with all the doctors notes, both handwritten, which could, you know, artificial intelligence can read kind of visuals as well as text and video and all that, and combined that with the doctor's notes and the reports and all the information in the New England Journal of Medicines, everyone that was ever written come up to with a 94% confidence rate.

What was wrong? And it turned out to be right. Like, that was the thing was called Kawasaki syndrome or something, and. And it was one thing that happened. So, like a version of house, except in 4 seconds.

Yeah, in seconds. I mean, that's really. That's really what AI is all about, right? It's about scale and. And about being able to kind of capture information that would take, you know, forever for some.

No human, no matter how much of a genius you are, is going to be able to read all the journal of Medicines and recall it and then be able to compare that. So, yeah, I've only read a couple years worth last weekend. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, so in all those instances, and I want to check one of the things one of our earlier guests, a futurist, said, look, generative AI, it's like, it's in its infancy, and it's like having 1 million teenage interns working for you.

Mike Linton

It will produce outcomes because it wants a really great reference, but you always need a human in between it and the final answer. And I think everything you gave me almost always had a human looking at it before it went out. So it can't be trusted with the full interface. It can be trusted up to the interface. Is that.

Is that how you see it now?

Babs Rangaiah

Yeah, I think to some extent that is. That is right. I mean, it's also the very, very earliest stages of. I think in the long run, you probably will be able to do some things without human editing at the end, at least not much. When it becomes real, when we have great data, and it's really much more polished, I think that that'll probably happen more.

But I do think today, yeah, there's an absolute need for human. I also think the most important skill sets. I mean, when we talk about things you need to do today, part of it is understanding artificial intelligence. Part of it's getting data in place and all that. But also, one of the biggest thing is, I think, is really developing your human skills the most important human skills that will distinguish, you know, you from me.

Because at the end of the day, we're all going to have the same information now, right? The smartest guy is going to have the same, you know, the dumbest guy is going to have the same information as the smartest guy, you know, in seconds. So what does it really matter? It's really about, you know, how, you know, so how you communicate, you know, how you tell your story, how you take that same information and think more creatively about what to do with it. All of those, all those things are things that are going to distinguish you from me, from somebody else.

From somebody else. So it's really about building the human, it's kind of a counterintuitive, but building the human skills, I believe, are going to be the most important things for those who, for companies and people that will have a competitive advantage. So, babs, give me what, how, if I'm sitting in the seat now and I want to start building those human skills, what am I building exactly? Or what should I start with in building the human skills? I think the first and foremost important thing is your communication skills, because you are going to have.

So if you and I have the same information, we get a bunch of data, we've got a rapport we've got. Influencing others is going to require our ability to communicate that, to tell that story in a way that's compelling and engaging to whoever is receiving it. That is a big skill that can easily be taught and can be learned and will have to be in order to be, you know, Warren Buffett, who you would think, you know, he is, he was interviewed on CNBC and they said, what was your greatest investment that you ever made? And you would have thought like, oh, I was early in Amazon or early in meta, whatever. And he said, the greatest investment I ever made was in an executive presence and communications class that I took with Dale Carnegie, you know, a long time ago when I was in my thirties in my career, that course, more than anything, I attribute to my success.

Now, here's a guy. He's not some big, like, speaker, charismatic guy. He's not Tony Robbins or anything. He's actually a finance guy. He's a financier, mostly in a desk in an office, right?

But even with that, he says that his communication skills, his writing skills, his ability to tell those stories to analysts and the media and to companies has been as responsible or more responsible for his success than anything else that he's, you know, that he's had to do, which is to me really interesting, because even for a guy like that. So I think, especially in marketing, where that, you know, communication skills are probably our most important skills as, as we try to market both our brands and manage our teams and all that. But I also think, you know, pushing creative creativity, curiosity, imagination. You know, one thing I always try to push this idea of, you know, a great. I'll give you a great example about how a human being can reframe, because I think reframing is something that's going to be important as well in your storytelling.

When radio first started, it was this, you know, big, ugly brown box, and it was replacing newspapers as the next medium. Yep. People used to read three newspapers a day. There was this guy by the name of David Sarnoff, who worked at RCA, which was one of the big radio manufacturers, and he had this big idea to run the heavyweight fight on the radio. And at that time, the only thing people got from media was news, because that's a newspaper.

We pushed this idea to his management, and they were like, that's a dumb idea. You know, like, you know, radios for news. And he's like, well, no, newspapers were for news, but this is like a live broadcast that we could. The heavyweight fight at that time was like the Super bowl. It's like this big event, and no one ever gets to see it live.

They always have to wait the next day and read about it in the paper. Anyway, so he reframed what radio could be for that time. Media used to be about news. Now he's saying, it's about this and that particular. So there's so many lessons learned from this which could be used during this AI period where management kept saying, now, and he kept pushing.

So persistence is important. Secondly, he ultimately management relents. So if you have a guy who's really leading and innovating and really wants to do it, you could probably get it done. But classically, management says, fine, go ahead and do that as a pilot or something, but we're not going to fund it. You have to fund it in your own budget, which, again, very typical of companies, right?

Fine, do it. They figured, he'll never do it or it won't matter. It'll be this tiny thing in the side. So he does it. He's so persistent and determined to get this done, hires one broadcaster.

He goes to the fighting broadcast. That one event changed the course. So that one event was a knockout. No. Look at you, Michael, today.

All right. But anyway, so radio became the biggest, you know, then all of a sudden, they ran music and soap operas and all in, actually, Procter and gamble created soap operas on the radio, all of that stuff. But it all emanated from the fact that this guy, who later, by the way, got promoted and became CEO of RCA ultimately, and then of NBC, which bought RCA, and he's now like this famous media guy because he reframed and he had an incredible, you know, he, he had the imagination and the persistence to do that. Those human qualities will continue to matter no matter what technology and no matter what media comes in because, you know, like, even like with artificial terms, I, we just rattled off types of things we can do, but guess what? Somebody is going to reframe and come up with something the way, same way kind of chat GPT came out of.

You know, there was, AI was around for a long time. All of a sudden they reframed it to be consumer centric and help you write emails and shit. The same thing's going to happen. Somebody's going to and somebody else is going to be a zillionaire and create something. And beneath us all is one of the themes I think through this is the curiosity to constantly be on the front end of stuff.

Mike Linton

So, Babs, we're almost out of time here, so take one of these two things. Funniest story and or practical advice we haven't talked about on the air. Pick one and, and go with it. And then, then we'll roll to the end of the show. Oh, okay.

Babs Rangaiah

So from me, you want practical advice? Practical advice we haven't talked about yet or funniest story you can tell on the air? I'll tell you one thing that I've been doing and being around. So I was a marketing executive for a long time, and the last three years I've been an executive coach. I went back to school at Columbia and got this executive coach degree.

So I'm around coaches all the time now, and I'm always getting kind of these, these tips on how to increase your productivity. And I will say I have, like a, you know, regimen now. That's, to me, like, incredible in how much it's increased my productivity. So here it is, like, when you wake up, do not hit snooze. Get right out of bed.

And because they, there's all this research that shows hitting snooze drives all kinds of anxiety for whatever reason. I think because you're hitting it and then you're staying there, it's avoidance behavior and you're not getting out of bed. Right. So you hit snooze. And then that's followed by this idea of sunlight before screen light.

So don't touch your phone or your computer until you walked around the block, gotten a coffee, whatever, but just gotten out of the way. And for me, the biggest thing is working out immediately before the phone or anything, whether it's yoga, meditation, the gym, whatever, automatically gives it makes me so productive all day because I think I just have like, you know, energy from that. And then, you know, other things like, you know, I turn the shower cold or whatever, you do those things and I promise you your productivity will increase exponentially every day. So that's. No, it's totally with you, babs, until you turn the shower on cold.

So just at the end, you don't have to take a cold shower, but at the very end, make it freezing cold and like totally with you until. We got to the cold. So I think that's a great way to run out the show. Thank you, pabs, and thanks to everyone for listening to CMO confidential. If you are enjoying our show, please like share and subscribe and look for all of our shows on Spotify, Apple and YouTube, and the I hear everything network, which include marketing, the battle between the believers and non believers.

Mike Linton

Parts one and two is the CMO job the hardest job in business. Business is AI, an extinction event for agencies and a report from the media front lines. Hey, all you marketers, be safe out there. This is Mike Linton signing off for CMO confidential.