Kipp Bodnar | Why Judgement & Taste are Key Advantages in an AI World

0:00The 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 IHearEverything.com. Welcome to CMO Confidential, the podcast that takes you inside the drama, decisions, and choices that go with being the head of marketing. Hosted by five-time CMO, Mike Linton.

0:38Support for this show comes from Noan, the company that builds a fact layer for your brand and business. Sometimes your marketing is a mess. Your positioning is a brand book PDF. Your messaging is a doc only three people can find. Your agency has its own version of both. That's not a source of truth. And your AI effort is sitting on top of all of that and guessing about what's right. Known fixes that issue. Known coordinates everything into a single brain and standardizes every change system-wide. A brain built on facts for your team, both human and agent. Get known for facts sake. Go to getknownatgetnoan.com backslash CMO.

1:29Welcome 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, Kip Bodnar. Today's topic, why judgment and taste are key advantages in an AI world. Now, Kip is the CMO at HubSpot, a position he has held for over 11 years.

2:08He's also a two-time author, having written B2B social media book and just recently, The Loop, which details why the traditional marketing funnel is broken and what to do about it. One of his beliefs is that AI will increase the importance of judgment and taste, and he's here to talk about that and more on today's show. Welcome, Kip. Mike, thanks so much for having me. Amazing intro. I'm honored. There you go. Well, I'm really looking forward to the show because - I'm going to have a blast. This is a super topic, but let's start with the funnel. Well, I think everyone kind of agrees the funnel is broken and AI smashed the funnel.

2:46We did a whole show on AI has smashed the funnel to pieces. What caused that break and how is it affecting consumers and companies in your mind? Yeah, so I think the biggest way it's affecting consumers and companies, there used to be this huge correlation. I could look at how many visits I was getting to my website and I would know how many customers I would get. Right. That there wasn't that much leverage in the conversion rate from visitor to customer. but there was a ton of leverage in getting more visitors into your website. And AI agents, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google Gemini, whatever tool you want to pick, they totally put that on its head because now, instead of going to a website and needing to read page after page after page, you can get a nice, tidy, written summary from 50 different websites, personalized just for you, in a nice little interface.

3:35And that change, you know, kind of started with the chat GPT moment in November of 2022 has kicked off, I think, the biggest marketing disruption in the last 20 years. I agree with that. We've done a lot of shows on that. And I want to first I have to say, you guys, HubSpot in particular, you were a leader in designing the marketing playbook based on that funnel. Yeah. Tell me the whole playbook is invalid now. Look, I think of it as eras, right? We had the outbound marketing era where salespeople had all the power, then HubSpot and a bunch of really smart people, Seth Godin with permission marketing, everything, kind of introduced the inbound marketing era where you could create content for your business and pull people in.

4:18And that worked great because I remember the day, Mike, I am so many years old that I remember searching Google and not getting a result for things. You know, there was nothing to read on the topic. And, you know, and so lots of smart companies filled that gap. They created a bunch of valuable information that people could go find and you wouldn't return all these Google searches without any information. And that worked. People grew customers magnificently. Now the search engine result page is dead. People aren't looking at those 10 blue links anymore. Right. Because of that, there's got to be a new playbook for the new world.

4:58And obviously, that's why we wrote the book Loop. But that's what I'm here to talk about today is that that core disruption has, I think, changed so much of what marketers have to do now. And it used to be called MQLs, right? Or still called MQLs. Yeah, I mean, look. Yeah, the old funnel used to be, hey, I'm going to get a visit. I'm going to turn that visit into a lead. And then I'm going to turn that lead into a marketing qualified lead. And that's super high intent. And I'm going to send my salespeople right after that. So let's talk about the attribution model, because that was a great attribution model for a long time.

5:31Yeah. Is there an attribution model now? Oh, I think in the book I talk about, the attribution I think is very similar. I think the attribution models are as good as the equations that you are looking at, right? Like what is the math that you're actually doing? So for example, the inbound era math was off. I write X number of blog articles or Y number of keywords. I'm going to get Z number of visits, right? That's pretty straightforward. That equation is broken. Doesn't exist anymore. So there's a new set of equations. So like, for example, the modern kind of loop era equation for that is what is the number, my number of mentions and my number of citations, which is how I show up in these AI search engines.

6:19If I'm able to grow those past certain thresholds, I'm able to acquire more customers and increase my close rates. And you have to basically make new equations for this new world that we're all living in. So just so everyone knows, the difference between a mention and a citation is… Yes. Exactly. So let's break that down. So if you think about what a mention is, if you ask, you know, Claude, ChatGPT, whatever, and it just says, you know, Mike Linton was amazing and he was the best chief marketing officer at Ancestry.com ever have. That's a mention. Now, if it cites your podcast and links back to that podcast so that after that, I can actually go and click where you talked about being the CMO of Ancestry.com, for example, then that is a citation.

7:06A citation is a link out of that AI search experience. And the important thing to know is there are three sites that are the most cited across these AI search engines, Reddit, the LinkedIn public posts, and YouTube. And so what you're seeing is marketers having to show up much more aggressively on those channels if they want to play in this new search world. Hey, so as a marketer, one of the things that you can see is, I guess it's called AI Slop, where it's throwing out content like crazy to try and get in these mentions and get picked up. You could just see, you know, LinkedIn has the, this might be Slop button or whatever the heck.

7:48Yeah, exactly. The LinkedIn Slop comments have been bad. Let's all agree, right? That's just so great. So, you know, are a bunch of people running at this the wrong way when you think about content you have to make to make mentions? Is it a numbers game? Is it a quality game? Tell us what it is. It's both. I think that's the thing that's changed, right? In that inbound era, if you just showed up, you'd get pretty good results. Even if it wasn't like, yes, there was a floor, but that floor wasn't that high. and if you were above that floor you were going to get results and now you kind of got to be taylor swift you got to be remarkable and prolific like you can't just be one or the other and when you talk about ai slop like it's i think it's funny because it's like shakespeare had i had iambic pentameter ai slop has like its own beat like if i'm reading the ai slop i can almost read it at the rhythm that the the ai is writing it so it's if you're going to win in this new world You have to have differentiated aspects to your content.

8:55Being great at content doesn't mean showing up anymore. It means, do I have unique proprietary data and insights? Did I run a survey of my customers? How am I using my customers' unique stories and emotion to tell those stories? Because before, you didn't have to do any of these things, right? It was just like, oh, I kind of thought this, or this is how you do this thing, and that's all that you needed, right? And in some instances, you could just buy your way there too if you wanted to, right? Yeah, look, there's always the wild, wild west of marketing. There's always things you can buy your way into.

9:32And that's not that dissimilar in this new world. Like, for example, there's been studies that LinkedIn creator ads, where creators are talking about your brand, you're paying them. those have positive influence on how you show up in AI search, for example, right? So that's an example of a direct correlation of like, oh, I spend these ad dollars, I get a better AI search return. And so there's always going to be advertising and money connected to this stuff for sure. I also have to say, I love that you brought up Taylor Swift after mentioning eras early. Yeah, of course. She kind of set the use of the term era, you know?

10:10There you go. And one of the things is, you know, AI can produce a ton of content. We talked about AI slob. By definition, AI is average content, right? Correct. I think that's a really important point. It's designed to give you like the average median results. And so now we're to the title of the show. Yeah. Regiment and taste. How do you know you're good? Because what I hear you saying, and correct me if I'm wrong, is as I do both things, I have to have a lot of content and it has to be good content. That means I have to have judgment and taste to pick it or else you have to have a lot and maybe not that good.

10:52How do you assess whether you're good or bad at judgment and taste? I mean, obviously you're great at judgment and taste because you're on our show, but how do you know you're good or bad? Well, yeah. So there's a lot to talk about on this topic when you think about judgment and taste i i think one of the big misnomers mike is that you either have it or you don't and that's a bunch of crap judgment tastes are just learned it means i care enough about this thing to consume all versions good and bad of this thing whether it be maybe ad designs or fonts pick your thing music doesn't matter so that I understand.

11:35And I have a big data set in my brain that I pick from that. I know what is really great and what's bad, but not just what's great and what's bad, but what's great and what's bad given the unique situation I have to apply it in. Right. And so the first thing I think about when, how do you know if you're great at judgment and taste is do you have lived experiences related to the problem you're trying to have taste around? I look at it as like, I consume so much marketing because my job's marketing and there's not a period of time where it's like oh netflix does this cool thing i want to steal that and do a different version of it for myself like you need to get the inspiration from everywhere else okay so you can learn this but before it's a learned skill before we go in to learn it are there some people that are just inherently bad at it yeah the people who think they know everything i think that's i think that's i I think that's just the truth.

12:29They're intellectually dishonest with themselves. And taste is an output of intellectual honesty. So how do I know if the people I'm working with or my agency is intellectually honest? They don't tell you everything's great. They tell you what's great, good, and bad. And more importantly, they can tell you why. you know like yeah so this is objectivity and causality as to the judgment and taste is that yeah taste and judgment is the ability to explain your decisions very clearly based on a goal and experiences you've had it's not some magic formula this is interesting now i started at png and brand management and one of the things they would always talk they would talk about judgment in particular do you have good judgment yes and is that the kind of training you're talking about here or is it more than that i think it's more than that judge to me i look at judgment as like am i doing marketing or am i doing art and like when you're talking to a creative person i always try to figure out are they are you an artist are you a marketer and if you're an artist you just care how beautiful this thing looks just to you right and if you are a marketer you care that it accomplishes the goal that you have.

13:50And judgment is normally a function of like, am I making decisions around the goal? The taste side of it, I think is very different, which is I have, first of all, I believe something. I believe something has to happen to accomplish this goal. It's not like I am going to paint by numbers. I have a counterfactual insight that is different than what the rest of the world believes. It's kind of the old Peter Thielism of like, you're really successful when you believe something that nobody else believes. And over a period of time, you turn out being right. And marketing is largely that, right? It's like, hey, I know it's not popular today, but I think it's going to be, and I'm going to do this thing.

14:31And I'm going to stand out because I can do that thing. Hey, do you have any good examples you can look from the book or anything on where this works perfectly? Yeah, there are so many, But if you think about, like, let's think about somebody who has good taste for the situation. Jesse from Savannah Bananas. You know, I'm sure you're very familiar with Savannah Bananas. But in the book, we talk about how Jesse, in the early days of forming the Savannah Bananas, which he had bought this kind of defunct minor league team, and basically decided, hey, this game of baseball is kind of slow and boring.

15:06And I should make it much better. In the book, we talk all about how he paid employees to sit in the stands with fans and look at when people were leaving, listen to what people were complaining about. And literally all he did was address those pain points. And the thing he did differently was like he didn't confine himself to like, well, this is how baseball has to work. No, I don't care about how. He surely did not. He did not, right? And to people's chagrin. But what he said is like, I'm trying to serve these people. So I need to have tickets not be expensive. I need concessions to be cheap and flat rate price.

15:43All of these things. I need to have entertainment in the sixth inning when everybody starts leaving. All of these things were outputs to just good taste, which ended up having to be, I'm going to do the opposite of what professional baseball does. Yes, and it's a riot to watch a game. Oh, it's so funny. and it's like and if you listen to him talk about it it's just he stumbled almost stumbled upon all these things but it was like comes back to the core belief of like oh i want to be different and i want to serve this group of people really well and the way he gets the fans involved in the product is is quite remarkable the whole kristin bell in denver walking through singing frozen with one of the players that happened a couple weeks ago i think that that video got i don't know 100 million views online like it was insane it's incredible what they're doing we're taking a short break

16:30Kipp Bodnar:from this show for a word from our sponsor. Support for this show comes from NON, N-O-A-N, the company that builds a fact layer for your brand and business. Sometimes your marketing is a mess. Your positioning is a brand book PDF. Your messaging is a doc only three people can find. Your agency has its own version of both. That's not a source of truth. And your AI effort is sitting on top of all of that and guessing about what's right. Known fixes that issue. Known coordinates everything into a single brain and standardizes every change system-wide. A brain built on facts for your team, both human and agent.

17:13Get known for facts sake. Go to getknown at g-e-t-n-o-a-n.com backslash c-m-o.

17:25Kipp Bodnar:Now back to our discussion. Hey, so when we talked earlier, we talked about non-binary decisions. Tell us what is a non-binary decision and give us your take on it. Yeah. So most people fail because they think there's only one solution to a problem. The answer is yes or the answer is no. That's a binary decision. Very few decisions are binary. Instead, there's dozens of different options most of the time. Your job is to first understand that, to avoid the 20 % that everybody else does. When you talk about taste and judgment in marketing, you're talking about how do you actually go against the grain, counter to the norm.

18:12and once you once you can do that look you might fall on your face a bunch but wow do you have hits i always think my job is to be you know doug leone was uh interviewed on david center's podcast this week and he was the founder of sequoia i think my job is to be like doug and my job is to take a bunch of chances and some of them some of those companies and tactics go to zero and some will go to the moon. And my job is to have a few big hits as a marketer. And that's what I'm trying to do. I think this is a really good point. When I was doing it, I did it the same way, which is we're going to make a bet.

18:52We just make more than a 50 % chance we're going to win. And that will be some research or some other stuff, but we're going to make a lot of bets. And over time, we'll win a lot more. And Mike, here's the framework I always, if I'm working with my team, might say, look, there's a two by two. One axis is how predictable what you're about to do is. And the other, the other axis is what I call the magnitude, how much potential it has to deliver an outsized result. And I don't want anything on the low magnitude, low predictability. That's just bad decision-making. You can want some things on highly predictable, low magnitude.

19:28Like, you know, you might have some always on email marketing campaigns that are going to live down there or something, for example. But I need to darn well be clear that I have stuff in that high magnitude, not predictable bucket, and I need to take those chances. And do we have enough bets in that bucket is really important. Hey, so when I am, when someone, when our audience is interviewing, let me be clear on this question. And our audience is interviewing something, because this is, am I good at taking risk and sussing out what is a real risk and what is really safe. How do you evaluate hires for this?

20:04What do you ask them? It's a really good question. I find that people who are good at taking risks are not like daredevils, which you would think that is the case. They are people who've achieved independently. It means that they don't have the best grades in schools, but they figured out how to be great at something. And, and give me, I'll give you the very specific example. If I interview everybody, I asked them, what is something that you would be verifiably better at than 300 random strangers if you were in a room with them? And verifiably, I give them examples. Like, Hey, if you've played a piano with in front of a concert hall with 300 people, you're probably better at playing piano than 300 random strangers off the street.

20:51And like, I go through all those examples and I have them just tell me, have they been great at something? I have a whole conversation with them. Well, how'd you learn it? What'd you do? And then I'll be like, well, teach me how to do that thing. And in that five to 10 minute discussion, you really get to unpack how somebody thinks and how they make decisions. And making big bets is largely about picking where to spend your time versus working hard. There are a bunch of great people who work really hard on the wrong stuff. The people who get really good choose to place their time in unique areas that are high leverage.

21:29And that's what I'm trying to dig into with these folks when I talk to them. And hidden in that answer also is I'm willing to buck the crowd to take risks. Yes, exactly. In that, they'll talk about how embarrassed they felt or how they upset their parents because they did this thing. Like that's super important. yes because the other thing that you can't that i hear you saying is you're not going to succeed at this if you can't take the heat from the idea look i definitely on the spectrum probably like i don't care what people think and that's like my best job like that's my best trade as a marketer is that which is very counterintuitive it's like i'm okay being unpopular you know like i just I know that my whole job is to not have apathy, to not have people not care.

22:20And so I'd rather people be a little frustrated with me than not care about me. And it's very, very, very hard for people to feel that way. I'm sure in your career, you felt that all the time. You were probably your CEO, your CFO, everybody was in your ear. Don't do it. It's too risky. Oh, our investors are going to be upset about that. Oh, our employees are going to be upset about that. Oh, this set of our customer base is going to be upset about that. Well, I had this thing. If someone's not mad at us, we're doing nothing interesting at all. So that's a great way to, but that's a great way to say it, right?

22:51You're just like, Oh, this is, you know, we have this amazing woman, Claire Hughes Johnson is on the HubSpot board and she says, great strategy hurts. You know, you have to make these tough decisions and they hurt. And I think great marketing has to hurt because you have to really stand for something in a way that's probably not going to make somebody happy. Well, and if you sand off all the cutting edges of your marketing, so it's boring, it won't work, and no one will be mad. And then you'll get fired because you didn't grow the business. Exactly. You're going to be like, well, what'd you do in the last year?

23:28Well, you didn't make anybody mad at you. Hey, I want to flip the question over to, with AI, you believe there's a new emerging friction point between CIOs and CMOs. Tell us what you see there. I think that's interesting. I think what happened is that whether you were a CMO ahead of sales, I think the technology buying process got very distributed over the last 10 to 15 years. CMOs just went out and bought whatever they wanted to buy. They had their budget and everything. Now that's not as true. The reason it's not true is because the consumption prices with AI, one, are really significant. So how you actually think about your token consumption, how that's going to trend, wow, that's pretty tough.

24:16Tokens are not free. Tokens are not free. Look, the price of tokens is getting better, but they are certainly not free. Not free. But you also, the thing with AI that most people don't fully understand yet is that AI with great context, like we have this thing in the book called a taste profile, which is everything your customer thinks about, you everything you think about your company and you give that to your AI and it gets, gives you way better output without good context. AI is pretty bad and worse with bad context or bad information or bad data. It's even worse. And so a lot of that context needs to be centralized, right?

24:51And you're, and you're asking the AI to have access to this, to your CRM, to your HRS system, all this stuff. And you're like, wow, I'm a CMO. I can't do that. I don't get to make those decisions. And so I think that's where the conflict's coming from. And how do you manage this issue correctly versus incorrectly? Well, it's a great question. I think there's a lot of, you know, one of the reasons I did the loop book was because everybody's asking me, like, how do I do marketing in this AI era? Like, how do my CEOs yelling at me? What the heck do I do? And step one is, like, people need to have the right tools and the right understanding of the use cases and everything to do.

25:31And so I look at it as you have to then partner with your CIO and you have to say, Hey, these are the use cases I have. Not that like, here are the five vendors I want to buy from. Here are the problems and use cases I'm going after. Can we work through these things together? And a lot of it depends on how technical you are. Like I'm pretty in the weeds of the picking of the technology. If you're less technical, then the CIO can bring you a handful of options and help you select them. But I don't think you can go rogue. Do not go rogue. Well, because if you're going to go buy all this stuff, it's not connected to everything, Mike, it's not going to work very well.

26:06I know. And marketers go rogue and that costs everybody. Look, I love going rogue sometimes, but going rogue with technology is not awesome. Yes. Go rogue with crazy ideas, not with your AI stack. Hey, can we talk about Goodhart's Law? Yeah, let's do it. you know, you optimize a measure. As soon as you put a measure in, everyone optimizes that measure, which creates a decline in the value of that measure. We had it on the show where someone was talking about when you go to kill cobras and pay a bounty, what you end up is a lot more cobras. Because everyone's like, I'm going to have a cobra farm and make a good zillion dollars.

26:45Totally. Incidents are powerful things. Yeah. How do marketers shift into the right measures here and think about what measures they should be paying attention to going forward in this new world? Yeah. So, you know, we talk, we talk about this in the book where it's basically, you need different equations. The problem with marketing, the real paradox of marketing, I think you probably know more than anybody, Mike, is that like the things you can easily, easily measure in your marketing are the least important things to measure because everybody's measuring them. Everybody's optimizing them. You're getting very low return, very low margin on those things.

27:27And if you're looking for certainty in your marketing attribution, you're going to get very mediocre performance. You'll be on the efficient frontier with no growth. Yeah, exactly. The efficient frontier. It's perfectly said. And so when you think about building these new equations, like I think working with creators is a really good example of this. So it used to be, you know, 10 years ago, you'd go put a credit card or you set up an invoice in Google. You'd set up some targeting and you'd run some ads. and you would have the attribution of like how many people saw my ad, how many impressions, clicks, and you'd run return on ad spend.