Announcer:
This episode of TechPod is brought to you by THWACK.
This year’s THWACKcamp is over, but all the sessions are now available on demand. For over ten years, thousands of tech professionals have joined this lively, interactive event for industry insights, product demos, and fresh perspectives on the ever-shifting IT landscape. Sessions include OpenTelemetry for Non-Developers; Automate Your Way to Peace and Happiness; Silos Are For Grain, Not IT; and What To Do If Someone Drops a Database In Your Lap and Runs.
Check them all out at thwack.solarwinds.com.
Sean Sebring:
Welcome to SolarWinds TechPod. I’m your host, Sean Sebring, and here to keep me in check is my co-host, Chrystal Taylor.
Sean Sebring:
In this episode, we’ll be revealing some perspectives about marketing from someone on the inside. We’ll be discussing technology’s role in the field and potentially de-stigmafying what we think of marketing. To help us on this mission, we are eager to welcome SolarWinds’ Chief Marketing Officer, Brian Goldfarb.
Sean Sebring:
Welcome, Brian, please tell our listeners about yourself.
Brian Goldfarb:
Thanks, Sean. Thanks, Chrystal. Really great to be here. Appreciate it. Good day everybody. I don’t know if it’s morning, noon or night when you’re listening to this, but we’ll just say hello to everybody. I’m Brian, I am the new Chief Marketing Officer here at SolarWinds. Very privileged to be a Solarian and be here today. So I joined the company, what, 85 days ago. Not that I’m counting the days or anything. No, it’s been great. And my background is in enterprise software for the last 25 years. I actually started my career as an engineer. I was a developer writing ASP, VB, C#. I started writing Perl and building websites in ’95 back in the dawn of the internet. So maybe that gives me a tiny little bit of cred. I can do a RegEx like the best of them. So maybe that gives me a tiny bit of credit.
Chrystal Taylor:
That’s impressive. RegEx sucks.
Brian Goldfarb:
Amen. It sucked then, it sucks now, but still learned how to do it painfully. In that journey, I worked at a bunch of places. I started my career at Microsoft, I worked at Google. I was the Chief Marketing Officer at Splunk and Tenable in the cybersecurity space. And I have a lot of experience working with the developer community, the open source community back in the day, as well as cybersecurity, DevOps and IT professionals. So marketing is a funny concept in those worlds and that’s why I’m excited to hopefully maybe shed some light on what it means to me, what it means to SolarWinds, because let’s not be confused, we do market, and maybe make it seem less scary, stigmatized for our listeners.
Sean Sebring:
Yeah. And I think a good way to start with that, and this is something we had talked about when we met before our episode here, is talking about marketing as a tool and tools are not inherently good or bad. So if you could say what is marketing a tool for that might help give us a foundation to this conversation of marketing there.
Brian Goldfarb:
Sure. Yeah. You’re exactly right. Tools in the wrong hands are evil. And I think a lot of people feel like marketing has been used for evil in lots of ways. My view at the end of the day is marketing is just communications, it’s information, it’s teaching, it’s how organizations or people communicate to each other, the means and methods and models, with the hope of leaving an impression. Hopefully that impression is positive. Sometimes that impression is negative. But ultimately you’re trying to accomplish some outcome and that’s what the tool is for. And it’s changed a lot over the years for those of you who have seen Mad Men and the old school 1950s Madison Avenue view of marketing to where we are today, which is even scarier and stalkier maybe. But the tool has evolved a lot. So I think marketers have a great responsibility to wield that tool appropriately for the audiences they’re trying to reach.
Sean Sebring:
Can you expand on why you think teaching, why you would say educating, teaching?
Brian Goldfarb:
Yeah. When you think about the best teachers, they are the best communicators. They take complex topics, they simplify them, and you walk away from those conversations better than when you started. And at the end of the day, they’re changing your perception, they’re shaping your mind, they’re growing you intellectually. And with marketing, that is one part and one method for how we can communicate. And I think when marketing is done great, it’s hard to differentiate it from teaching.
Chrystal Taylor:
I love this perspective about thinking about marketing, the fact that you see it as a responsibility. We’re also responsible for the messaging that we’re putting out there as marketers because I work in marketing. It’s the same thing. And I’m a firm believer in educating where we host events, we do things all the time, and my goal is to educate our end users. So I think it’s really important that you mentioned that, it is a responsibility. And we certainly know that there is bad marketing out there, there’s tools out there used to market ideas that are maybe not the best ideas and we all have our own perspectives of that.
Chrystal Taylor:
But I think importantly, as a person, you’re marketed to and you are marketing all the time. And we talked about this in our pre-discussion of how you go to a job interview, you’re marketing yourself for that job interview, you go to your kid’s school and you’re trying to get them into a program like Gifted and Talented or something like that. You’re marketing your kids. It’s a matter of perspective. And I think that marketing gets a bad rep because it can be used as a negative tool quite often. And people tie it so closely to sales and we work for a software company, so let’s not be disillusioned and say that we’re not also using it for sales because we are. But that doesn’t mean it’s the only goal. We believe in our products.
Brian Goldfarb:
And I don’t think it’s necessarily bad that marketing is a foil to sales. We live in a consumerized society. We buy things, we need to learn what we buy. I just bought new headphones because I’m doing a bunch of travel and I read a bunch of stuff on the internet on whether I should get the new Bose, the new Sony. I totally got marketed to a lot. I got content marketed to because someone paid someone to write a review and I got followed by ads on Amazon for the next two weeks until I bought something and then I got followed by ads afterwards. They did a bad job. But it’s okay because ultimately it served my purpose, which was educating myself so that I could make the best decision for me, make consumer review. If you’re even not a purchaser, you’re just a user, maybe the thing is free, you’re still at some level consuming marketing.
Brian Goldfarb:
Let’s just talk about Open Source, which I think is an interesting concept, phenomenally impactful in the world, has changed everything really. And the amount of good it’s done, although it’s been an interesting couple of weeks in Open Source supply chain, the XZ Util and things like that. But just using free software, contributing to a community, being a member of a community, while you wouldn’t call it marketing because it’s not overt in what you might align to in a traditional sense, it is. They’re giving you that thing, they’re trying to convince you to use it, they’re showing you value, they’re solving problems. All that in some way falls into big, broad, super bucket. And maybe I cast a wider net than the average person, which is fair. But I do think in many ways it’s all part of a broader story that you’re telling and you’re just using different ways of telling it. Sometimes it’s code, sometimes it’s community, sometimes it’s content, sometimes it’s advertising, packaging.
Sean Sebring:
You said net just now. And before we finish our stigma part of this, I think that’s where a lot of the stigma comes from. Like if you’re walking your dog and the dog’s not good at being walked with a leash or a lead and you pull, they bear down. People don’t like being got, they don’t like being led. They don’t like feeling that someone made them do something. And so like you just said net, it’s not even that they wouldn’t have wanted the product they were being marketed. They may actually walk away because they have this stigma that says, “Oh no, they’re just trying to get me.” I agree with a lot of your sentiment, which is I actually find it convenient that maybe my Alexa or Google heard me and now they’re helping do research for me and sending me these ads so that I can go through these reviews and there’s so much value to be taken from reviews and things like that.
Sean Sebring:
Like you said, someone may have been paid from it, but it’s an assistance to me in some ways on my journey to whatever I was looking to buy in the first place. So trying to embrace that marketing and be okay with it is something I was thinking about when preparing for the episode.
Brian Goldfarb:
There is a level of just getting over it. Sure. But I do think, to the point of using tools for good or evil and having some control. So I might not want the A-L-E-X-A sitting behind me to listen to what I have to say. But if I have control where I can say, “Hey, I don’t want to do that and I don’t want you to do that.” And we talk about privacy, we talk about the right to be forgotten, we talk about a lot of the things that we’re doing as a society to enable citizens to have more control over themselves and the digital world where your footprint is very complex, extremely unmanageable in a lot of ways. I think that’s a big part of it. That’s where it comes down to responsibility, like Chrystal was commenting on. We can wield this microphone, this marketing tool set in a very positive and constructive way that aligns with the ethics of any individual and you can not.
Brian Goldfarb:
And that’s where the stigma comes from, I think, in a lot of ways because not everyone wields that tool in the same way and not everyone wants it to be wielded in the same way.
Brian Goldfarb:
Like when you throw a party, you can’t please everyone. There’s always going to be someone who’s like, “I like brown chips,” whatever, “I’m not a guacamole person,” or whatever it happens to be and they’re just unhappy with the food. Or you throw an event and you do a survey because you want to know what people think. Someone’s going to say the room is too hot and someone’s going to say the room is too cold and it’s impossible to find a temperature that satisfies 100% of the people. And in many ways when you’re doing marketing or any sort of communication or engagement, you have the same problem. So the goal has to be to, one, have principles that you follow, that you feel comfortable with so you can sleep at night. And two, to do everything you can to address the maximum utility for the maximum amount of people knowing there’s always going to be some group that is unsatisfied and that’s okay.
Chrystal Taylor:
I think privacy is a conversation that we could have for hours. So I’m going to gloss past all of that and I’m going to say that I think pointing out that human beings are different and there’s always going to be detractors is really important to notice, especially with the advent, this impact that social media has on us these days. It’s got people in a choke hold. You see things on social media all the time, and I think what I want to stress about that is as a consumer of any kind of marketing, it’s also your responsibility to validate integrity. As marketers, it’s our responsibility to deal with marketing with integrity. We want to represent our products or whatever we’re marketing ourselves in as honest a way as possible. I think part of that is shaped obviously by perspective. What is truth, right? That’s a whole different conversation.
Chrystal Taylor:
We’re not going to get too philosophical, but what is truth? And truth to me might be different than truth to you, which leads to those detractors saying, “The room is too cold.” Well, the room was just right for 50% of the people, but to me the truth is that the room is too cold. There’s a lot of wiggle room, I guess, around your interpretation and your perspective. I think it’s really interesting to think about the fact that when we’re building marketing, when you’re consuming marketing, you should be looking at it as they’ll cast the widest net. They’re trying to cover as many different perspectives as possible, which might not always match your perspective, but it doesn’t mean that they’re… necessarily. It doesn’t necessarily mean that people are trying to get one over on you or pull the wool over your eyes or these negative reactions that people tend to have.
Chrystal Taylor:
We are talking about, you’ve dealt a lot with engineers and developers and all that kind of stuff, and we know IT professionals, developers, engineers tend to have a negative reaction to marketing and sales, like a blanket negative reaction. And I think earlier you stressed so much the importance of communication and really all marketing is is communication. And if people could think about it in that different perspective of just open your mind a little bit, a little bit to see what are they trying to communicate to you, that should be your question when you’re getting marketed to. We do all watch those reviews. I don’t know those people, but I want to know what they thought about this thing before I buy it. They bought this thing, I don’t know them. I don’t have any idea if they’ve used many other things like this and this one is the thing. Sometimes they have and sometimes they haven’t. So just like as a person that has to consume marketing, it’s something to think about as you go through your normal life.
Brian Goldfarb:
Oh, there’s so many things you said that are worth exploring. Perception is reality. It’s trite and an overused euphemism, but it is honest and right. So I think when you think about communications and the experiences that individuals have, it doesn’t matter what your intentions were. It matters how they perceived it and their experiences, their biases, their backgrounds all play into that. And it has to be something that you hold in your mind and as you’re thinking about the best way to approach it. It’s impossible to solve for everyone’s perception. So you have to be really intellectually honest with yourself knowing that you’ve got to meet people where they are best you can.
Brian Goldfarb:
Truth is another funny concept. We’ll stay out of the muck for the most part in the concept of software or in technology marketing. And I think one of the places where we’ve lost the room with technical users, whether you’re IT professionals or developers or security professionals, anyone who sees themselves in the mirror and says, “I am a technical person,” they demand a type of truth which is aligned to, “Can I touch it, play with it, use it, and does it do the things that you said it was going to do?”
Brian Goldfarb:
And what’s happened for better and for worse over decades in how people work with that community is what we say and what we do has diverged. There’s become more and more daylight there, and that’s a complex problem and it has broken down trust and has reshaped truth for technical audiences. I think one of the things we talked about leading up to this is coming from that background, one of the things I’ve learned is the best way to build trust with those audiences is to try to keep your story as close to the truth of today as possible. Where that breaks down a little bit and why it gets complicated is when people buy things, particularly in software, they’re making a long commitment. Is it six months? Is it 12 months? Is it four years? It’s a long time and sometimes the future is also the present.
Brian Goldfarb:
And so that’s a tough balance because you’re communicating to people who want to know what’s coming and you’re communicating to people who don’t care and don’t believe you until it’s actually there. And sometimes that creates some of the friction and the disconnect. And that balance is, as I’ve learned over many, many years, impossible to strike. There is no correct answer because if you go too far over your skis, you’re going to upset everyone technical, but you might actually be right in the right place relative to the market and the buyer and the long-term needs. And if you hold it too tight to where things are, you might just get left behind even though the person who’s using it is like, “You said it does A, B and C, and it does A, B and C,” and someone else said it all the way to Z, and your boss’s boss’s boss bought that.
Brian Goldfarb:
And so that’s the rub on some of those things. And then the last I’ll say, which might be fun to explore. You talked about breadth, the blanket conversation, and that’s historically what’s made marketing hard. You have one thing for all people. What’s cool now is you don’t have to do that. You can actually be a lot more personalized and specific, and part of that’s super scary because you can get stuck. The world can tune itself to exactly what you want to hear or what you expect to hear, and it can mislead you in ways that you don’t expect. We see this in social media and playing out in a lot of ways. It also happens in the echo chamber of software.
Brian Goldfarb:
If you want to believe something, you can certainly find that place to believe it. And so I think we’re in this interesting world of like, “Hey, I can have a…” Just think about a website. I can get the website in theory to tell you whatever it is you want to hear for you, and then I can get it just tell Sean whatever it is he wants to hear because he likes blue things and you like green things and that’ll just change. You had to make those bets. Those are all interesting topics for sure.
Chrystal Taylor:
I just want to add a little bit there, a little bit of color to what you were mentioning about the truth in marketing. I think something to realize also is that the truth, especially when you work in technology, is constantly changing. So we as marketers developed a piece of marketing that was designed for you specifically that you like blue or green, but between when we developed that piece of marketing and the time that you read it, many things will have changed. Many things will have changed. You work in software, you work in development, you work in anything that works with technology, and this will take us to our next point, especially if you’re using any tool that includes AI, that truth is going to change between the time of when I created it, when I created this piece of education even and the time that you consume it, that truth may have changed 15 times and it may not have changed a lot. It may be marginal, but it might be enough for you to say, “They weren’t completely honest.”
Brian Goldfarb:
Ain’t that the truth? Because things are evolving. You think about cloud software, CI/CD, theoretically you’re pushing new stuff every second and it turns out writing words takes time. Even if you use a robot, it still takes time. And so things go out of date really quick, which is another reason to be ahead just to give yourself a chance. And if you happen to catch it at the wrong time, whatever it can be, it can be weird. One of my pet peeves is, and I think software marketers are the most guilty of this and executives are the most guilty of this, the boredom factor and the repetition factor. You build something and you do it once because it’s a lot of work. You guys both build training and content and videos. That doesn’t take five seconds, that takes days and weeks to put together and it’s a huge investment, heart, mind, and soul.
Brian Goldfarb:
And then you do it once and everyone’s like, “Do it again.” You’re like, “Well, wait a second. How many people saw? I don’t know, 367. Cool. How many humans are there? Okay, nine billion. How many people do we care about? More than 367.” And by the time you get it to everybody that you want to see it, it’s been out for months. The people who are talking about it have seen it a bazillion times. People who haven’t seen it are like, “I never knew this.” And that goes to your temporal piece where that content evolved without ever changing over that time period, whether you saw it the first time or the 10th time or whatever and where you tuned in.
Brian Goldfarb:
That’s I actually think one of the hardest problems in our world. Like what does it mean for something to age out? When is it truly not useful? You could apply this maybe in a more relatable way with that ad you see on TV for the 75th time and you’re like, “Oh my God, if I see another Rice Krispies ad, I’m going to jump out the window.” But not everyone’s seen it, and that’s a really tough conundrum.
Sean Sebring:
I can imagine that marketing metrics are some of the toughest things to measure and because of what you just said. There’s so much unknown out there about, well, we see that it was clicked 50 times, but how many of those 50 were the same person who clicked and forgot and closed it out and clicked again? I can only imagine.
Brian Goldfarb:
It’s actually a crisis right now. There’s a crisis in measurements of marketing. If you talk to CMOs and marketing professionals all over the place in any industry, digital marketing created the most measurable form of marketing ever. And at the same time, it’s shifted everyone’s desire to only measure, and as a result, it’s created tension in the ecosystem around the marketing that’s harder to measure and harder to quantify ROI on. And that’s a really interesting current state problem that’s often discussed in the frame of awareness versus demand, which is a silly framing.
Brian Goldfarb:
Brand impressions are an easy thing to pick on. How do you value that? How do you measure it? How do you know in, B2B software more specifically? B2C is a little different. How do you know if that thing was useful? And it’s created a lot of really interesting incentives. Some of those are good, some of those I think are really bad, but it’s probably the biggest topic right now amongst marketing leadership because we all know intuitively, religiously, I always say, you got to believe in this because you can never really show the value in the way that digital marketing has promised the world that it has.
Brian Goldfarb:
And then the flip side of that is the promise isn’t very real either. There’s a lot of black magic and voodoo, but they’ve convinced everyone that, “Oh, you can just stripe the measurement end-to-end and you’ll get the answer.” And that’s true if you run an e-commerce site and you buy a T-shirt and that transaction takes 72 hours, two weeks, a day, instantaneous. It’s extremely untrue when those conversations last for months or years.
Chrystal Taylor:
It’s an interesting problem between qualifying your metrics and quantifying your metrics. If I can say, “Someone clicked on this 50 times.” But what does that mean? Are they going to do anything with that information? Is it reaching them? Is it educating them? Did they watch the video for more? These metrics all don’t mean anything without context, and I think that is probably the largest problem there. You talked about that conundrum that I’ve seen as well, even just in my small role in marketing, which is mostly educating and working with community, but even in my role in marketing, I’ve seen that be a problem, and it’s a big point of contention even between marketing departments because there’s different types of marketing going on and even between marketing departments, it’s a big issue of what do we quantify, what can we qualify and what is actually important?
Chrystal Taylor:
And you mentioned that digital marketing has made this problem for itself, and I think that’s a good point of what is the role of AI in digital marketing? It’s still continuously evolving, but where do we see this going? I think we need process and protocols and we need safety measures. And of course there’s the all-present privacy concerns, which we aren’t going to get into too much, but I think that there are definitely regulations that need to be made because it is new technology. Like with any other tool and any other technology, even if it was like a hammer that I could wield, there are regulations around that. You can’t just go buy a million hammers and then expect that it’s going to do something for you. It’s the same kind of concept. You can’t just go do those things. You can’t go buy a million hammers from Home Depot. They don’t carry a million at the same time there is some sort of process and regulation around it, even if it’s something so simple as that kind of a tool and AI is much more complex and continuously, it’s still evolving.
Brian Goldfarb:
You actually can’t disentangle those conversations and it’s okay. They’re super important and I think marketing is in crisis on metrics. I think the world is in crisis on what to do with AI. It was an academic exercise five years ago for most people on the planet. And then in November 2022, when ChatGPT launched, by about January, those who were watching realized that everything was different now, and we’re in the very early days of that transition, and it’s a topic that I’m super passionate about, so we can talk about this for a million hours, but its impact on marketing is dramatic. There are safety concerns, so going to truth, what is truth? There are trust issues. Like we are still dealing with hallucination and the impact of that and what it means and how to think about its role in both product and marketing. We have completely changed the velocity equation.
Brian Goldfarb:
So what used to take time doesn’t take time anymore, and so we’re flooding the market and because most people don’t know what they’re doing, it’s all kind of the same, which breaks the discovery model on the internet pretty dramatically. You also are seeing the predominant discovery methodology, which is search, which we’ll just call Google for now, is dead. It’s not dead yet, but it’s dead and it’s just a matter of when, not a matter of if, because there’s no reason to search. The whole algo that they built, which was amazing back when they were competing with AltaVista is no longer interesting because why would you search the internet when you can just get the answer from all knowledge and it’s going to be right more right than whatever webpage you had. So as a marketer, now you’re starting to think about completely new concepts, which is how do you impact an LLM’s training?
Brian Goldfarb:
Can you bias it in your favor? Should you? Well, whether you should or shouldn’t, people are going to do it. So then you have to start asking all the second and third order questions and you alluded to them, regulation, then they’re talking about government and the impact of policy, who follows that policy and why, how you enforce that policy. You can even look at GDPR as an early indicator of how hard this is going to be. The EU deserves a ton of credit for being way out in front and trying to protect individual rights around privacy and owning your data and having control, and it’s still not particularly good or effective at scale. In spam, we all get tons and tons of spam every day and it’s illegal. Let’s not be confused, and yet we still get tons and tons of spam every day. So we are in a really interesting time.
Brian Goldfarb:
I was at a dinner Tuesday with partners in Miami and we were talking about 20 years, the concept of 20 years, and so it’s 2024 right now, and we were talking about 2004 and what did the world look like in 2004? Well, the iPhone hadn’t launched yet. That happened in 2007, beginning in 2007, January 9th, 2007 in fact. The iPod had just come out. Cloud computing wasn’t really a conversation at the time. So 20 years is not that long. It’s technically one generation, even though the generational gap has grown in the world, but if you just use the average of 20 years, it’s one generation. 2004 and 2024 are unrelated. And so if you think of AI as an accelerant on change that is more significant than the convergence of mobile and cloud, it’s really even hard to predict what 2044 is going to look like.
Chrystal Taylor:
Yeah, I can’t even think about it. I just see the Jetsons. It’s like that was the concept back then of what the future is going to be like, and it’s the same bizarre concept of your brain can’t possibly quite imagine what it’s going to be like because technology is advancing at such a rate. And you’re right, AI is an accelerant. It’s throwing lighter fluid onto the fire that is technology evolution. It already was going so fast, exponentially fast, and now is increased even further. So think about what 2044 is going to look like.
Brian Goldfarb:
Exactly. The human brain is particularly bad at thinking about exponential growth. It’s just not something that we’re wired to think about and AI is accelerating in an exponential, exponential growth rate. We learned that we were bad at exponential growth when we looked at COVID growth curves. People didn’t understand how two could turn into two billion. That’s just a hard concept. And now we’re talking about how two turns into everything overnight. The thing that I see in marketing, let’s just bring it to marketing, marketing and technology. The common conversation is like, “Well, it sucks,” or, “It doesn’t do this yet.” And what I have to remind people is that if you can define the thing it doesn’t do yet, then you’ve already defined the thing it’s going to do soon.
Brian Goldfarb:
And if it’s not doing it good, then you’ve just defined the thing it’s going to do great soon, and soon as in decades. It’s soon as days, hours, sometimes minutes. Because if you look at what GPT-3 did just in November and where we are with four and what we don’t even see as the public, which is the next gen stuff, all the things that are bad now are already fixed. Just look at what’s happening in video.
Sean Sebring:
That’s actually where I wanted to chat with you on this next. I think AI is still worth sticking to for a minute, and we didn’t cast a negative light on it. We were just saying there’s a lot to be concerned about with its potential. But just sticking to the exciting part, if you weren’t scared of its scary potential, tell me, Brian, how you plan to use and… we mentioned it’s a tool. AI is a tool just like marketing is a tool. I think the best ways to leverage AI haven’t even been thought of yet because it’s a tool, so it’s like what are things, ideas and ways of leveraging AI that you’re excited about and that benefit marketing greatly?
Brian Goldfarb:
It’s an amazing topic to explore. I want to be very clear. I’m not scared of AI. I’m scared of bad actors in every new technology. I think we see that all the time, and I know that bad actors will weaponize AI. They already are in negative ways and it will stigmatize it. Just like bad actors weaponized marketing in negative ways and gave it a bad rap for a lot of people. But for good actors and people with principles and people who want to use it for good, the utility to the world is significant. And if you think from a marketing perspective, we can start walking through the use cases. Let’s just use this podcast. We’re going to spend an hour together talking about things, and now we can transcribe it into text and then we can use that text with AI to produce the ads that tell us what’s coming, to produce the images that market it, to produce the blog posts that tells people why they should care.
Brian Goldfarb:
That summarizes this conversation because no one wants to listen to an hour long thing, they just want the sixty second TikTok version and then build the TikTok post. And then send the e-mail to your people about the thing and respond to the e-mail when someone asks a question and give them a better answer than the person who would’ve answered it before. You think about production. We spend a lot of time producing things, art, images, things like that. That goes away because robots will do it better, faster, cheaper, and that’s a great thing because the people then can be creative as opposed to doing the rote work that has to get done. I think it’s become an essential tool already as a thought partner. I don’t know anyone out there right now who when they want to go debate something, doesn’t go to an LLM and have that debate first.
Brian Goldfarb:
Product naming, it’s incredible. We used to pay hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars to organizations that did product naming. Now you can have a brainstorm with the robot and get to a great answer in two minutes. Is it as perfect as that organization? Not yet, but it will be tomorrow. The use cases are effectively infinite in our world, and it’s also scary because it introduces this entire issue of providence and trust. So is it human? Is it not human? Who am I talking to? Do I care? Does it change my experience positively or negatively? And then how does that all get instrumented? That’s just the tip of the iceberg, Sean, on like the use cases are going to change the marketing world.
Sean Sebring:
You triggered another question that’s very close to that by using our example of this podcast episode. How far away do you think there are tools that do exactly what you said as part of a platform? Because today, as far as I know, there are marketing platforms where you could say, “Here’s a tool, check the boxes for what type of content you want,” and it spits it all out.
Brian Goldfarb:
The first gen stuff exists today. I say there’s a lot of grift in this space right now because there is. Everyone has basically painted AI on everything, and one of the challenges is it’s hard to go through the noise of the market. There’s a land grab for an infinite amount of capital that’s flowing towards the ideas around it. So that’s the first issue.
Brian Goldfarb:
But there are real products and real things out there that are exploring these concepts. I’ve seen them and they work. That’s what’s crazy. Going back to learning, education and marketing, all of this requires new skills that we have to build and develop, and as you build those skills that you’ll have them. But yeah, there’s a huge explosion in… I’ll go back to your question. Is there going to be an explosion of companies and product that service what I’ll call creators? A hundred percent, already happening. Hundreds of millions or billions of dollars are flowing to those companies. There’s a million questions around what ends up happening because you have a lot of legal questions around copyright, trademark, infringement, things like that. That’s all being explored. That’s the policy side of this. All the things I said about this podcast are doable today with software that exists right now.
Chrystal Taylor:
To be clear, we’re not using it.
Brian Goldfarb:
No, we’re not. Although I’ll speak as the SolarWinds’ CMO, we should be. We’re not though. And I think companies are rapidly trying to figure out how to do it and the right way to do it because I think that’s where it gets really complex.
Chrystal Taylor:
Well, that’s the thing in technology as well, even when you’re using technology is where’s the risk versus reward on being on the bleeding edge? It’s first gen. There’s risks with that. There’s obviously going to be bugs. There’s going to be things that have to be worked out. It’s anything in technology, anything at all. So it’s a good point to bring up. I did want to touch back on, you were talking about how this is going to necessitate new skills, and this is for marketers, but if we’re going more broadly with AI, this is for everyone. Sean and I have had several conversations.
Brian Goldfarb:
Engineers are more impacted today than marketers in this world.
Chrystal Taylor:
I think the important thing to remember as if you are getting scared of the repercussions and the new skills you have to learn that aren’t there yet is the most important thing to think about is the skills that you really need to hone are critical thinking and asking intelligent questions, that will lead you to the rest, that will lead you to develop the other skills that you’ll need to keep up with the trends, is critical thinking and asking intelligent questions and verifying that integrity. As I’ve said before, AI is only as good as the data that it’s based upon. So anything that you’re using it for, keep in mind that you need that data to be validated and it needs to have integrity. And you said earlier, it’s going to have bias whether you want it to or not, and that is true. That’s one of the largest problems that AI is having right now is the bias which humans already have. We already see it all the time because humans have it. So does AI.
Brian Goldfarb:
That’s right. And I think that’s where people struggle. The problems we see in AI are the exact same problems that manifest in humans.
Chrystal Taylor:
I think the expectation is that computers are better than us in that way because theoretically they should be unbiased because they’re not human. But the fact is that they were created by humans, and we don’t have quantum computing.
Brian Goldfarb:
Well, again, what’s the concept of super intelligence? What’s the implications of super intelligence? Would humans even be able to recognize super intelligence? Because in theory, super intelligence should be so intelligent that it tricked the humans into not realizing it had happened. If you start thinking about, we talked about generative AI, but all of this is really about AGI and whether we can achieve it, what does it mean in getting there? And it is philosophical, but it won’t be. There are philosophical conversations today that will turn into actual conversations tomorrow. And does that impact our audience? No, but these are the things I think our audience thinks about all the time, and this pondering, what is the impact? I think Microsoft got it right with their branding of copilot in the short term.
Brian Goldfarb:
A friend of mine works on the team when they first launched it, I remember texting him and being like, “Oh, you guys totally nailed this.” The marketer of me was like, “Oh, brilliant.” Because we’re so afraid of it, human in the middle, blah, blah, blah. Is it going to replace us? We’ve always had these fears about the robots are coming for our job, but the idea that the robots will be our partners and make our lives better and change where we spend our time, our critical thinking, our questions, and that’s what you see today.
Brian Goldfarb:
And so if you take the engineering hat and put it on for a second, you used to have to go open up the book and find the algo or the API documentation, and now it just tells you what to write. And do you feel good about that or bad about that? I feel great about that. I think that’s amazing. I shouldn’t have to figure out how to write the algo. I should just be able to tell it. And I think if you pull the string and not too long, the number one programming language in the world is going to be English. It’s not going to be whatever it is today.
Sean Sebring:
Well, that resonates with what Chrystal said, which is asking good questions. My mother was visiting for a few weeks in March, and to her and her generation, she’s not as used to AI. And I was telling her there’s a whole new skill in trade around folks who know how to prompt AI. It’s a whole new skill. And in fact, I believe it was Singapore, so I hope I’m not wrong saying this. They’re releasing new higher education for that generation to be able to keep up, teaching them how to prompt AI and leverage AI so that they’re able to keep up with the younger generations because it’s such a powerful tool. Like we said, exponentially, they’re going to be left in the dust if they don’t know how to use it.
Brian Goldfarb:
The phrase that’s the term of art that’s materialized is prompt engineering. That’s the skill that you put on your resume. What does that mean? TBD, right?
Sean Sebring:
There will be a new C-level role for it soon. So I was blown away when I saw Chief Experience Officer, so I was like, “Okay, there’s got to be a new chief role coming up in this realm.” But yeah, this has been just such a different perspective on things because we did turn it into a topic of tools and education. As catchy and made up as we’re trying to make de-stigmafying marketing, I think we’ve done a pretty good job of just hashing that out over the last 45 minutes or so.
Brian Goldfarb:
That’s exactly right. A lot of the things wielded in the right way are incredible things not are bad, and how you perceive or how you choose to perceive something will impact your experience. And so I think if we think about my role as a marketing leader and our team of hundreds of quote unquote marketers, whether it’s AI or digital or community or branding or anything really, if we take the right headspace and like, “Hey, we’re working with an audience.” That audience has a set of needs, how do we serve those needs in the way that’s the most respectful to them? “I’m technical. Educate me. Tell me the truth. I’m a decision maker. Educate me and show me the future.” Those are diametrically opposed, and one audience would hate the other. That’s okay. That’s okay. We have to be able to manage both. But we don’t have to hate on marketing for that because I actually think we’re doing a service in that lens. As long as we’re honest intellectually and actually about what we’re doing and when.
Brian Goldfarb:
It gets gnarly when you start calling it manipulation, and that’s where I think the stigma comes. It’s fair and it’s unfair because that’s a negative word, but shifting perception is not a negative. You wake up in the morning and say, “I want people to like me.” You go to school and you want friends. All that’s shifting their perception. Like, “I want someone to see me as an athlete. I’m going to work hard, I’m going to exercise, I’m going to practice so I can get better.” Marketing plays all of those roles in the communities that they serve. And so for our audience, for me, the big takeaway is, “Hey, we aren’t here to do evil. And when you don’t like something, it’s okay. Maybe it wasn’t for you. And maybe we got it wrong and need to hear the feedback so that we can do better.” All that’s possible. I think that’s the big thing for me.
Brian Goldfarb:
And I also think one thing I wanted to get across is there are marketers, most of them who kept this and who want to build a world where marketing is a discipline that serves in a high integrity and extremely useful way. Education, community building, perception shifting, awareness building isn’t bad either. Just because we’re running TV commercials, radio ads, or following you on with a display ad, is it necessarily bad? Because it might just open your mind to something that you weren’t aware of or that you didn’t know. And then it’s incumbent on you, the recipients of that marketing, to do the work, to learn, to get educated, to make smart decisions, and to participate in ways that make everything better. And that two-way is the shift I think that the whole world needs to have with marketing. And so when you think about de-stigmatizing, if you start to internalize some of these ideas, marketing gets a lot less terrible and a lot more awesome.
Chrystal Taylor:
I think that that’s a really important point, which is that we as marketers are sharing a story, sharing a message, and the one you received may or may not have been tailored to you. I think you’ve made a really important point too, about feedback of we are listening. We get your feedback. Whether you liked it or didn’t like it is important. And I think the important thing to note there is that going back again to what I said earlier, just because you didn’t like what you saw, doesn’t mean that it necessarily was targeted at you in a negative way. It may have just been intended for a different audience because we’re telling different types of stories to different types of listeners because people see things in different ways. We’re different. We’re humans. So keep your eyes and ears open. Maybe it wasn’t intended for you, but share your feedback. Maybe we can share a different message that was intended for you.
Sean Sebring:
Awesome. Yeah. Thank you, Chrystal. So Brian, man, I really want to thank you for your authenticity, and this has really helped me with the de-stigmafication of my own perception of marketing. It was great to understand how another department leverages the things we as IT experts may forget can be leveraged outside of just IT. So Brian, thanks for joining us, man.
Brian Goldfarb:
Awesome. Yeah, happy to be here. Great to connect and hopefully meet a bunch of people online. I would encourage anyone if they have feedback, I want to hear it. I’m pretty easy to find.
Sean Sebring:
Thank you, listeners, for joining us on another episode of SolarWinds TechPod. I’m your host, Sean Sebring, joined by fellow host, Chrystal Taylor. If you haven’t yet, make sure to subscribe and follow for more TechPod content. Thanks for tuning in.
