How Brands Can Break Through in the Age of AI with Kelly Cheng, CMO at Goldcast | Ep 431

0:01Welcome to the marketing millennials, the no BS marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray. And join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the up. Welcome back to another episode of the Marketing Millennials podcast. Today, I have the CMO of Goldcast, Kelly, here. Excited to chat. Kelly, welcome to the podcast. Yeah, thanks for having me. Looking forward to the chat. I would love for you to go through your journey because I know you came through agency, you had growth roles, and now you're a CMO.

0:49So could you give me the rundown of your marketing career? Yeah. So I would say that I've been a marketer like from early, early days. I think the first time I pitched an idea was when I wanted a pet. I want a dog. And so in order to do that for my family, you got to put a business case together. And so at the age of seven, I did a PowerPoint presentation and pitched, put together a whole narrative on why we have this pain point of loneliness and sadness and that buying a dog will help fix that and solve for us. And so early days, I've been a marketer at heart, but I've always known that marketing was something that I was passionate about just because I was very interested in mass communication.

1:43And so that's what I studied in college. And while in college, I was in Boston and so had the luxury of being in a large city. So I did internships throughout the years in college and really, really got into the advertising agency space, both in account management. Then after I graduated, it was media planning was how I got into marketing specifically. So through media planning and strategy and coordination, that's really how I got into performance marketing. always been within the B2B side of things also while learning about the B2C side too. So I've always balanced some kind of B2B book of business on the agency side, but also working with consumer packaged goods, luxury, retail, etc.

2:27So really having that 360 view of marketing both on the consumer side, but also on the business side. And from the agency side, I bounced around here and there, small, medium, large size agencies and decided to go in-house because I really wanted to make bottom line impact. I think on the agency side, it's so easy to get tripped up on like the vanity metrics of clicks and costs per clicks and costs per leads. But I really wanted to understand like ROI and how to actually measure that in a very complex system. And so that's when I went in-house and really started really understanding more about the B2B marketers role.

3:04I wanted to go into this because I know you've held a lot of growth roles before you became CMO of Goldcast. How does that growth marketer DNA shape how you think about brand building and mindshare? Yeah. So when I think about growth marketing, the foundation of it is having a growth mindset. So growth is one thing that every business wants. So when you see there is a growth role, whether it's a growth product, growth marketer, growth whatever position, it's always interesting because, of course, any company wants growth. But I think when it comes down to actual growth marketing, it's operating in an agile way and consistently experimenting and hypothesizing and really, really being able to use experimentation to help move the needle towards what your hypothesis is on what you're trying to grow.

4:02And so when I think about growth marketing, that's how I think about it. It's really having a growth mindset. It is a very broad function. It could be within brand. You're doing growth within brand. You can do growth within your free trial product. You can do growth within your email marketing. So there's so many different ways that growth can show up, which is why I love it, because it requires a lot of strategy and making sure that you're just not like ripping and replacing something that you've done before. It's really unique to a situation that you're sitting in. And so that's the stuff that really lights my brain up, and I get really excited about it.

4:36And so when I think about growth and how it kind of builds towards Mindshare, when I think about Mindshare, it's all tied with growth and brand. I think a lot of a lot of marketers think about brand as like the big flagship messaging logos that you see. But brand isn't just about capturing like the top funnel awareness. It's about continuing that journey throughout. So even after someone who has bought your product, whether you're in consumer or, you know, B2B, you're going to have to consistently win them back. The market is way too noisy today for you to just stop doing marketing once you have that sale.

5:19Because, you know, in software, there is that annual recurring revenue that we're looking at. Every year you have that renewal that you still have to work towards. And so marketing doesn't stop after the contract gets signed. It's every single touchpoint. It's the entire customer experience all the way through advocacy. And that's really how I think about Mindshare. It's the consistent messaging that you see throughout the customer journey. And that's not just tied to like the awareness funnel. You said that you made that presentation as a kid of like, like to get a dog for your family. And I want to know like how you present to a CMO, I mean, a CEO that's saying, okay, Kelly, I don't really care about brand.

6:06I don't really care about money share. I just want pipeline. I just want pipe. I don't care about those things. What is like your conversation to defend that long game marketing? Yeah. I mean, I think that's a very real thing. A lot of people equate brand to Mindshare. In my mind, Mindshare is the bigger hierarchy and brand is underneath it. It's still a big category, but Mindshare covers the broad spectrum across the entire brand experience and journey. And it kind of bridges thought leadership as well. Um, so it's really challenging to defend that because when you're talking to a lot of businesses that have really complicated BI tools that report out on attribution, brand is often overlooked because it's difficult to track brand.

6:56And so it's hard to defend to the board. And so I think it's a lot of educating about marketing. So when you're going to get, um, you know, budget buy-in, like the CMO going to the board to going to the CFO, CFO may not understand how marketing works. the value of marketing beyond what you see in a spreadsheet. And so it's really on the marketing leader is to do that cross-functional education. So all the stakeholders understands the impact of marketing beyond what you can track in terms of ROI. And I know you mentioned thought leadership. So I know you've also said in the past that you believe video is like one of the single best mediums for trust at scale.

7:36and like especially now that ai is like flooding everybody's feed why do you think video specifically um is uh one of the best mediums to invest yeah so i'll take a step backwards i think like in in today's day and age um you and i are both probably just flooded with ai stuff ai content an AI slop. AI is getting better. I'm definitely catching myself being like, is this AI or is this not AI? As in maybe a year ago, I would have assumed everything was real, but I'm getting like smarter now on figuring out if this is AI or not. I think with video, authentic video is still hard to come by, especially in the B2B side of things.

8:23And so when I think about in this day and age of AI and you're getting bombarded with digital AI slop, events is really key because events is still really, really that place, that source of really trusted engagement signals. For marketers, it's harder to trust engagement signals now because AI can fake so many things. But with events, you can't fake that handshake or that conversation or that person you got coffee with or had a breakfast or saw on a panel or had a discussion about. And so those are the most valuable signals that you need to put your bet on this year because of the AI paradox that we're experiencing.

9:02But video is really how you scale events because events historically has always been seen as like a one and done after you do your event. Whether it's digital or in person, you move on to the next thing. But with AI, you can repurpose and really, really take your video content and repurpose it into small little clips across your YouTube playlist or your Instagram Reels or your LinkedIn. Turn it into multimedia content like blog posts with both text and video. So there's so many ways to scale video. And I think video is, as a science, and looking at the human brain and a lot of research around it, human beings process video at a much faster speed than they read text.

9:50And our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. So long-form text and long-form video is not getting engaged as much. And so as a marketer, it is our responsibility to make sure that the pieces of content that we distribute meet our audience where they're at, whether it's format, whether it's destination, because it's not our choice anymore. The audience has the upper hand in figuring out where they're consuming content. And there are so many ways to consume content. And video historically has been very difficult to create. You have to have an agency, freelancer, expensive, specialized software.

10:28If you're looking to do a production, you may even need to have equipment. And AI has made that a lot easier to produce high-quality video where you don't need to invest in production, be able to repurpose and edit and do post-production without the full team. So being able to scale video now is the opportunity for a lot of marketers. Because I was scared of video before AI as well. I want to know also, I know you and your team at Goldcast surveyed over 500 marketers about this topic, AI and video. So what do you surprise most at the results that you got back from that survey? Yeah. What did not surprise me the most was how many marketers were already using AI in their day to day.

11:20but what did surprise me the most was the level of AI that they were using in terms of, like a lot of people would say they're using AI if they're just chatting with Claude, like a simple question and answer type thing. And so the maturity I thought was not quite there. And especially with video, I think that there are a lot of tools out there. At least the survey results show that there are a lot of tools out there. Adoption's not quite there. And so I think that we are in the early stages of a journey right now where we're going to be flooded with a lot of AI marketing tools for marketers to adopt.

11:56And that was surprising to me that we were not quite along the journey on adoption. Could you define like what would you in your mind like what is like what what is like OK, the level of maturity is chatting with Claude is level one. Like what is the orgs that are starting to move past the chatting, doing, especially this like go down the rabbit hole of video content creation, marketing, what are they using AI for? Here's my here's my takeaway that you need to have the will in order to build the skill. And so that's really where the growth mindset comes in. If you don't have the growth mindset to want to learn about AI, you're not going to make the time to do it.

12:38because from what I know is that all marketers that have a full-time job right now or even not a full-time job, they're slammed. They're so busy to do more with less. And so they have no time to fix their pet project with AI unless they prioritize it. And that's really where that growth mindset comes in. So I think it depends on the person. I think it depends on the environment that they're in. So I've noticed that marketers at smaller and newer organizations versus larger, more enterprise organizations are more enabled to use AI tools and more empowered to do so because they don't have a security implication that enterprises typically also look at.

13:22And so the limitations of using AI is not so limited when you're in a smaller organization versus a larger organization. And so when you're looking at the maturity and the breadth, I think it's also important to understand the underlying opportunity that some marketers have more of an opportunity to explore these AI tools and therefore become more mature. And some just have more guardrails and restrictions where they actually don't have the access to try and learn these things. But if you're asking me about leveling in terms of maturity, I would say the baseline is using basic perplexity, GPT, Claude to ask questions like a chatbot.

14:02I would say level two is actually using those tools to produce an artifact, like actual production of creation of work versus getting information, extracting information. I think the third level is probably where you introduce the word agentic, where you kind of bring a few AI powered tools or softwares to be able to complete a job that needs to be done. And then I think the very, very mature AI marketers are kind of using agentic workflows across teams and not just on an individual job to be done. So think about a workflow for like account based marketing, for example, where there's an agent that, you know, does the promotion and then automatically does like the program set up and then automatically does the actual content and automatically does the post event.

14:49So it's like you remain that human in the loop, but the human in the loop is that much less responsible for the busy work. I want to go into breaking through as a brand. I know you've like you really care about trust and, you know, it's critical for B2B. So with the world flooded now with the content, how does a brand earn that trust? Trust is never earned overnight. And so you do need to be set up for success where you have that stakeholder buy-in, that executive buy-in for this initiative of trust building to be prioritized because it does take resources to do. It's not done overnight, not done by one person.

15:33I would say that for B2B companies today, it's tough because the buying journey for sales is completely changed. Whether you're product-led or sales-led, there are so many competitors out there for software companies, technology, B2B, that there are unlimited options. So, for example, if you're asking me, oh, I want to I need I need a new chat bot. And in my mind, I'm like, all right, well, I'm going to go look at. Drift, Qualified and, you know, Intercom, because those are the three brands that already have my mind share. And Forrester has data that shows that even though options are getting larger and larger in volume, buyers short lists are getting shorter and shorter.

16:21So from a few years ago, where a short list of software you might evaluate might be seven, today it's three. And so that fight for mindshare is what's important. It's not fight for intent. Because when you have the intent signal and you see someone that's ready to buy and you reach out to them, that ship has already sailed. Because their mindshare has already gone to the other three companies that do similar things that they've already known about. And so that's really where marketing comes in. where marketing's responsible is to drive that mindshare and to help sales grow that pipeline at a scalable rate.

16:57So that's how I kind of think about mindshare and how video comes to play because video is so impactful when sharing an authentic human point of view. And when I talk about authentic video, I'm not talking about AI-generated video. I'm talking about video from an authentic source. That source media is so important. If you don't have good content going in, you'll have bad content going out whenever you repurpose it. And so that integrity of that initial source is so important. And events is the best place to capture that because that's where you have real people, real subject matter experts, real customers on a stage talking about the thing that you as a company and a brand care about the most.

17:40And when you can capture that with video and then use AI to repurpose it, that's where you can get mind share at scale and build that authentic trust, putting that human first. And in a very AI cluttered world where everyone's getting AI avatar videos, you get that human face who you know and recognize as that subject matter expert for whatever field you're in. And that's how you build that trust. so what i'm getting what i'm getting from this is video is one of the best ways to break through in the age of ai what what are some other ways you're thinking of like you're thinking like how does goldcast break through besides like doubling down on video so when i'm looking at my team today it looks very different from maybe like two three years ago in terms of what we're prioritizing just because I have limited resources.

18:32I can't just like scale and spend in every possible like marketing channel we would want to do. And so really, really prioritizing. And so for, you know, we are really focusing on video and events, like I said, which makes a lot of sense for Goldcast and Cvent as, you know, video and events companies. But we're also really looking at community engagement. So really, really working on our influencer programming to build that authenticity and trust with brands through a proxy of a subject matter expert and their audiences. So using influencers, partnering with different communities in the space.

19:12So marketing millennials as an example, really, really, really prioritizing that engagement with the people versus producing like another ebook or another report that could just be, you know, generated by AI if I just click type a couple words. And so really, really prioritizing those human connection moments, because in a world where there's just so much digital AI slop, this is what it's breaking through is that human connection piece. You know, you said earlier that AI is really, in the age of AI, it's easier than ever to like produce more video. Like what does it look like actually using AI to produce video?

19:53What do you need to do? Do you need to have a long form piece of content? Do you need to have someone going to a conference and getting a clip? How are you thinking about using AI for video? Yeah. So at Goldcast, we use Goldcast as our webinar solution. And so we run a lot of webinars and we record all those webinars automatically through Goldcast and we repurpose them automatically through Goldcast. So it's all through one system and I would call that like an agent on its own. And so what it looks like is if we had a virtual event, for example, it's a flagship virtual event, it's four days, we've got 30 speakers.

20:38I would then post event or even during the week of the event, go through the content and work on the content strategy of like distribution. So how do I want this virtual event to live on after the live experience? Okay, I'm going to put together a landing page with a couple of videos on clips so people can go through and watch the highlights. Okay, I'm going to build a YouTube playlist or maybe a couple of YouTube playlists that have a theme that threads so people can go through and watch the video content and kind of binge it in a sort of short form way. So there's different ways that you can think about and strategize on how the video gets distributed and created after you process it with AI.

21:21But I'm a believer that in this day and age with AI making videos so much easier, you have to, as a marketer, be curious enough and interested enough to figuring out on how to do it yourself. Gone are the days where you would be able to say, oh, I need a video editor. Let me go find the budget for it. But that's my prediction in the shift in how we work is that it's going to be expected that you are able to do it yourself because AI is enabling it for the marketer. And so at Goldcast, that's how we're processing video from every single event. We strategize the content and how we want that content to continue living after that live moment.

22:03How does this weigh in your scale of, do you think brands that develop the best AI, like marketing teams that develop the best AI systems, win? Or do you think the brands that develop the strongest point of view, win? Or is it a balance between those two? That's a good question. At the end of the day, I think for a business to win, you need to have, you know, product market fit and a message that resonates with your buyer. That's table stakes. Without that, any kind of AI structure or foundation or abilities is never going to make you get more buyers. I think, yeah, that makes total sense. Because I think eventually, like now, the AI systems is going to edge out a lot of like help edge out marketing teams who don't use them.

23:00But I do believe that eventually it's going to like flatten and like the best marketing teams, the best like executors, the best creative people are going to like who use have the best. like those ai systems are just gonna win because i think it's the human is gonna eventually rise like the humans at the company i think that's my prediction not now but because i think that people who are just like how people like were great at targeting like five years ago that they could target everybody with okay creative still won because they just knew how to target better than everybody else. Now, like you need that good creative because the systems can target for you.

23:50Yeah. So I think the same thing's going to happen with AI. It's like, like, it's kind of like flattened. And then someone who, the people who have taste, who use Goldcast, for example, are going to win versus the people who are just like spitting things, like putting generic things out and then like thinking that they're going to win that way. You make a very strong point with taste, who knows what AI is going to do or going to be able to do like a month from now, a year from now, like it will probably be very, very, very impressed. As of right now, I don't see that AI has the taste for like, they don't have the benchmark for taste.

24:29Like AI is not very good at getting taste right yet, especially for like brand creative. So it'd be very interesting to see how things develop from here on out. I want to also ask you, what's something you believe about AI and marketing that a lot of marketers probably would disagree with you on? I would say there is a scenario where you as a marketer are overusing AI and no longer having that human point of view. And I would just caution marketers for not falling into that lazy marketer trap. So making sure that human in the loop is still very, very strong. Because I think that there is a world where we have AI talking to AI.

25:17Like I'm doing some work and AI helps me create a document. I send it over to somebody and ask them for feedback and they have AI give feedback. And so we've got AI talking to AI and I think that's just not productive. Yeah, it's super not productive. Especially like agents giving feedback to agents. Yeah. Like you need a human somewhere in the process. Like I talked to someone the other day and it's just like every AI, every agent needs a manager that's a human. Absolutely. And you need someone who's coaching because AI can go and just like a human can go down a weird rabbit hole. And if you're not coaching it, it'll keep going down that rabbit hole.

25:56And if you don't catch it soon enough, it might be going somewhere you don't want it to go. Exactly. It's like a very technically skilled intern with no context. Exactly. I want to also I want to ask you, like, how are you thinking about, let's say, like hiring and structure of your marketing team now that AI is in the picture? Like what's different than what you thought about when you built a marketing team four years ago? I am personally taking more of a crawl, walk, run approach. So I've seen very polarizing opinions out there about replacing complete roles with AI agents and maybe even getting rid of the marketing leader because it's really all agents.

26:45And so I'm more of a believer of crawl, walk, run, where right now I'm really looking to evaluate and understand the team's skill and will of AI as a general sort of theme and functionality. And then, you know, as we continue to grow our business and, you know, as our strategy and our challenges continue to pivot and any opportunity to be able to hire somebody that has that built in AI understanding and growth mindset. That's how I'm kind of bringing in the AI talent and building the team out. So I'm not necessarily saying, OK, this function is going to be replaced completely by 12 agents and I'm going to need one person managing those agents.

27:30I'm not kind of going that far yet and kind of more watching the market and seeing the capabilities evolve and seeing how, at least in a large enterprise organization like Cvent, how we are able to take advantage of some of the AI capabilities and structures without completely blowing everything up and having business impact for the sake of using more AI. yeah like i also it's tough because i think like we we just said um like you need someone with taste to coach some of these people and if you like create an agent for let's say a role that's never been done by someone who had tasted or like experience and you're and you use an agent like how are you actually knowing what good looks like if you've never seen what good like in that with that agent i mean the agent might be learned from a tool that someone who was a good let's say content marketer did but i think you need you can't completely replace that person because that person is like gonna tell the agent like okay these are this is bad or good i just think agents right now are like hires for like people who are already great on your team Exactly.

28:49And so you make it it's an interesting kind of almost generational thought, because I almost feel bad for new graduates coming into the workforce because I see that, you know, AI really came into like, at least my work day to day life, maybe like six, seven years ago. I think like Chachi PT first came out and it was like crazy. I remember that day very well. But before AI came, you know, I had to be such a subject functional expert in my role. I have to know and really, really understand the steps of my job and what my job is impacting. And then I was able to build the agents because I have the context and the experience to really understand what this agent is supposed to do for me.

29:37Anyone coming in new to the workforce and is starting to learn about this, they're being asked to skip steps. Like, oh, you don't have to learn how to do it. We just have an agent and you just have to like poke a couple of buttons. And I think that's a mistake. I think you still as a human need to know the foundations and understand how it's done or else you're never going to really be able to learn like how is this impacting? How do I take it to the next level? How do I continue to incrementally build to make it better? because I think for those that don't know the foundations of a role that an agent potentially is replacing, you're losing that foundational knowledge, that tribal knowledge.