Humans of Martech Jon Taylor, Phil Gamache

Today, we are diving deep into a topic that's pertinent in our fast-paced, hyper-connected world… no not AI, taking a break from that haha - Talking about escapism, and the importance of disconnecting from work. 

On the show we like to balance the hard martech topics but also the human angle. This is an episode that feels quite timely. 

In a time where being 'always-on' is the norm, and our work Slack is just a ping away, it's crucial to understand the significance of stepping back. Escapism isn't just about dodging reality or ignoring responsibilities; it's about giving our minds the necessary break to recharge and rejuvenate. 

I’m a big fan of fiction and love sharing top TV show and book picks and always wanted to find an excuse to do this on the podcast so what better way to do it then an episode about the benefits of escapism and detaching from work. So stay tuned later in the episode for my fav TV shows and books.

Here’s today’s main takeaway: When used properly, escapism through fictional narratives is an essential aspect of maintaining our mental health, enhancing our overall creativity and helping us become better humans. 
The irony of recording this episode on the weekend isn’t lost on me, but this is my hobby and we’re having our best month ever on the podcast so I wanted to keep the momentum going and continue giving JT a bit of a break. 
Here’s a quick outline of what I’ll cover today:

Definitions, what is escapism, what is healthy, escapism and what’s the difference between meditation
The importance of disconnecting from work and how to successfully do this
What happens to your brain when you indulge in fictional narratives 
Strategies for healthy escapism
My top TV shows and my top books
How to strike a balance and avoid over-reliance 
I’ll start off by confessing that I didn’t always think this (that escapism is an essential aspect of maintaining our mental health and enhancing our creativity). In my younger career, I fully embodied the idea that an hour spent on learning things that can’t help your career is an hour wasted. 

If I read a book, it was about business or marketing.
If I was listening to a podcast, it was about marketing automation.
If I was reading a blog or a newsletter, it was about martech.
If I was watching Youtube videos it was Photoshop tutorials.

While this is great and likely contributed to increased performance at work, it didn’t give my brain the break it needed to disconnect from work topics.

Movies and TV shows were the exception though. If I watched a movie it was sometimes a documentary about consumerism or psychology but movies were where I got my main dose of fiction. I grew up an avid movie buff and watched all the classics and most of IMDB’s top 250 movies of all time. 

I didn’t grow up in a household with workaholic parents but they did love their work. My dad, specifically a photographer and video editor, spent a lot of his down time watching youtube videos and tutorials following industry tech and other photographers. He’s definitely a source for instilling this growth mindset in me. But what he also did was read a lot of books. Some non fiction biographies, but lots, lots of fiction. John Sandford, Ian Rankin, Peter James. I guess it kind of instilled this idea that you can be amazing at your craft, but still indulge in fiction.

I’ve had several jobs that you could describe as high expectation, high pressure. I remember when the shift to remote work began a few years back. Working from home was initially exciting. No commuting, being in the comfort of my own space, it sounded amazing. But soon, the boundaries between my work life and personal life began to fade. My home was my office, and my office was my home. I found myself answering Slack messages on the couch and at dinner time and checking email campaign reports late into the night.

The expectation to almost always be online to answer questions for teammates that w

What’s up folks, today we’re joined by Bobby Tichy, he’s Co-Founder and Chief Solutions Officer at Stitch. Bobby’s a highly respected Martech veteran having spent over a decade working in technical roles for some of the biggest names in martech:
He spent a combined 6.5 years working on the Professional services teams at arguably 2 of the most well known companies in martech, Salesforce and Marketo where he was able to lead and support countless implementation projects for some of the biggest brands in the world.
At Salesforce he focused on Marketing Cloud technical and functional architecture. At Marketo he focused on project and program management.
In 2016, he left the in-house world and jumped to the agency side of martech working at Lev (a premier Salesforce consultancy) for 6+ years where he focused on Marketing and Enterprise architecture solutions. He also co-founded the In the Clouds Podcast, a show about Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
Last year, after Lev was acquired by Cognizant, he co-founded Stitch leading their solutions team. Stitch is a new martech consultancy that specializes in Segment and Braze tech stacks.
Bobby’s an expert in all things marketing technology architecture, customer data platforms, customer journeys and Dachshund dogs as the proud dog dad of 3. Bobby, welcome to the show, pumped to chat today.
In-house vs agency
I’d love to start by getting your take on agency vs in-house, pros and cons and maybe get the inside scoop on going from SF to arch-nemesis Marketo a few years ago?
I think the, the easiest way to think about agency versus in-house is when I was at Salesforce and Marketo, you’re really just focused on the specific problem as it relates to the technology. So that might be implementing, you know, Salesforce, Marketing Cloud or implementing Marketo for a particular customer. But when we’re on the consulting side or the consultancy side, you’re really more focused on that customer. 
So what problem are we trying to solve? It’s much more about business problems and outcomes than it is technology problems and outcomes.
That’s probably the best way to think about it. Or at least the the biggest delineation that I’ve seen over the years, which the consulting side is so much more fun and so much more complex. It has each has its own challenges.
On the SF to Marketo switch, I think I I was so naive at that point I had no clue that it was like moving to their arch nemesis. Now it would be like going from Braze to Iterable or you know something along those lines. And it was interesting because I even remember at the time, once I got to Marketo, there were all these kind of rumblings. You never know if they were founded or not. But you know when Exact Target got acquired by Salesforce, was it, you know, who are the other bidders? And I don’t know if you ever listened to the Acquired Podcast, but there’s an episode of Acquired on Exact Target and Scott Dorsey goes through like that whole process. Which is pretty neat. And then he mentions the SEC filings, they actually have to disclose, they don’t disclose the actual companies, but you can kind of deduce who the other bidders were. It’s kind of neat to go through.
But anyway when I got to Marketo, there was like all this conversation about Salesforce because the Salesforce and Marketo integration (at the time) was market leading as far as market automation platforms were concerned and the Exact Target and Salesforce integration was not all that great at the time. Now obviously that’s totally flipped, but at the time it was interesting because I remember my first two projects on Marketo and Salesforce, I would kind of throw Exact Target under the bus a little bit with the horrible integration they had with Salesforce even though they were part of the same company. But I I had no idea to your point kind of like the political elements of my switch at the time.
Switching platform expertise, from SFMC to Marketo to Braz

What’s up everyone,

If you haven’t checked out our previous 3 episodes in our AI series you might want to before this episode, we give you a lot of context around some of the events that have happened and will shape the conversation today.

So basically

How fast could AI change or replace marketing jobs?
How marketers can stay informed and become AI fluent
Exploring new paths to future-proof your marketing career in the age of AI

Today we’re diving into specific tools… there’s a lot of noise out there right now.

What tools you should play around withIn TMW #107 | ChatGPT and the artificial marketer, Juan Mendoza explains that

“...generative AI tools are already everywhere. From text generation to video and audio production, to image creation, there’s a thriving industry of technologies taking small slices out of our creative talents, packaging them up, and selling them as a SaaS product on a recurring revenue model. If you’re wanting to stay relevant five years from now in the marketing technology industry, you’re probably going to have to learn some of these platforms. In 2010 we used to say: “there’s an app for that”. In 2023, we will be saying: “there’s an AI for that.””

Outline
Here are some of the topics for this third AI episode:

Key AI technology definitions and how to differentiate real AI tools vs all the noise out there
Deep dive into tools
Content marketing tools
Email and marketing automation tools
Predictive analytics tools
Text to presentation and pitch deck tools
3D animation tools for product marketers
Sales and outreach tools
Text to website creator tools
Ad and social creative tools
AutoGPT and AI agents
And a bunch of other tools like conversational search engines, 1-1 convos with celebrities and an even longer list of honorable mentions 


Here’s today’s main takeaway:
The key to future proofing your marketing career with the ever changing AI landscape is to stay curious, get your hands dirty and experiment fearlessly: Fill out some forms, spin up free trials, get on wait lists, and give new AI tools a chance. It's only by actually getting your hands dirty that you'll discover which tools truly work for you and which are just part of the ever growing sea of gimmicky AI tools.

Definition of tech terms
I’ll be using some of these terms throughout my analysis of some of these tools so here’s a primer explaining the three most common AI technologies used for marketing applications: 
ML
Machine Learning): ML is a way to teach computers to learn by themselves, without having to be programmed for every task. They learn from examples and data patterns to make predictions or decisions. Applications include segmentation, predictive analytics and propensity models. 
NLP
Natural Language Processing: NLP is a subset of ML and focuses on enabling computers to understand, interpret, and generate human language. Includes sentiment analysis, machine translation, named entity recognition, text summarization, and more. NLP techniques usually helps computers understand and communicate with humans using everyday language. 
GNN
Graph Neural Network: GNN also a subset of ML is a type of neural network that aims to handle graph-structured data, data organized like a network or web of connected points. Applications include analyzing relationships between different things like users in a social network or users in your database or recommending additional products based on past purchase history. 

Real AI vs noise

Part of the reason AI gets a really bad rep, especially in martech, is that anything that’s built on if statements or simple Javascript logic gets called AI. There’s still plenty of AI startups that shout about their proprietary AI when it’s probably just a few decision trees and a few interns running spreadsheets.

Now though, you have an even bigger bucket of noise that’s essentially “slight tweak on Chat-GPT”. 

Developing AI that was comparable to hum

What’s up folks. This is part 3 of our deep dive into AI impacts on marketing jobs.

I want to start off by apologizing that this episode might be a bit rusty, I’m attempting to record this while fully sleep deprived thanks to a 1 week old newborn at home haha Our daughter arrived nice and early and, yeah it’s been a wild change in sleeping patterns haha.

In our first episode we introduced the topic and covered how fast AI could replace marketing jobs and what the transition might look like. In episode 2 we covered ways marketers can stay up to date with the latest advancements in AI.  

Next up, 
3. Practical changes and new areas marketers can invest in (today)
4. Find the top AI marketing tools and filter out the noise
Here’s today’s main takeaway: 


AI is already disrupting martech but in 5-10 years our jobs are likely going to look very different. Now is the time to figure out if you need to make changes to your current area of speciality in order to future proof your career. 
Ask yourself if you should double down on additional areas like data and API services, getting closer to product and customers or starting to learn about ethics and data privacy.
Today we’ll help you reflect on different options to investigate as you navigate through this future landscape and what job titles of the future might be in store for marketers.

Here’s a quick outline of some of the new marketing areas to potentially focus on that might future proof your career if AI becomes as big as some are predicting

Outline


AI tech implementation, find ways to use AI and automate tasks
Data and API services, exposing data from your business to let AI assistants leverage them
Getting closer to product and customers, deeply understanding customers is always going to be something hard for AI to replicate
Copywriting, generative AI is great at creating the familiar but can’t yet create the new
Ethics, privacy and responsibility, AI is really bad at displaying the POVs of underrepresented groups
And a look into the future at emerging tech, trying to guess some future job titles for marketers
I have to admit, what spurred this whole AI series and what led to my diving into the rabbit hole was a genuine fear, or at least serious contemplation about whether I needed to focus on new marketing areas or pivot in some case.
New marketing areas to focus on

Yeah it’s a totally valid question and probably something a lot of marketers are wondering. 

Phil you had a great episode previously (part 2) that covered how we can stay informed… let’s chat about what you can do practically about your current situation or at least start thinking about career transition strategies. 

Some of you listening or reading today are probably already in a really nice spot. Our podcast mission is to future proof the humans behind the tech and if you’re already working with marketing tech you’re in a really nice position to continue the shift towards additional AI and automation. 
We talked a bit about this in the first part of our series – but I think that AI developments represent that same type of shift that we’ve seen in the past. The change always seems bigger when you look back historically, but living through these developments are step functions not quantum leaps.

Still – it bears repeating – the pace of change in AI is far faster than other emerging tech we’ve seen in the past. I think while the tech is moving blazingly fast, there is already considerable pressure to throttle development. 

One thing that is highlighted in that Goldman Sachs fear report about Millions of jobs being replaced by AI is that despite losing millions of jobs, AI may also mean new jobs and a productivity boom.

The report cited that 60% of workers are in occupations that did not exist 80 years ago. Think about aht for a second. 

I think that all you have to do to see how fast things are going is to pay attention to the developments coming out of

What’s up folks. This is part 2 of our deep dive into AI impacts on marketing jobs.

In our last episode we introduced the topic and covered how fast AI could replace marketing jobs and what the transition might look like. It's not like our jobs are gonna vanish overnight, but the shift is happening faster than many of us realize. AI's no longer just a loosely backed buzzword; it's doing things today that we used to think were impossible. So, as marketers, we've gotta take this tech seriously.

Next up, 
2. Staying informed and keeping up with changes (today)
3. Practical ways marketers can adapt for the AI-driven economy
4. Find the top AI marketing tools and filter out the noise

Outline
Here are some of the topics for this second episode:

Staying informed, who to follow, courses to check out
In person events and networking
Exploring new sources of income
Here’s today’s main takeaway: 


The impact of AI on the job market is difficult to predict in 5 years let alone 10. The only way to future proof your career and position yourself to thrive in an increasingly AI-driven economy is by staying informed and developing new skills. 
We’re going to double down on some of these in today’s episode.
Commentary/question on shiny object syndrome vs being an early adopter.


As a marketer, it’s our job to stay modern - it’s true of any job, but marketing is on the next level
We self propel change and create our own reasons to change things up. 
We suffer a bit from herd mentality as well – I think we tend to rush the new trend, be it TikTok or ChatGPT and choose saturation instead of consideration
I don’t think the value of being an early adopter is being “first;” rather, it’s giving yourself time to immerse yourself and begin to master the topic
To learn a topic, you simply can’t read 5 blog posts and master it; I firmly believe you need to get hands-on experience
Shiny object - Try to make a buck, dispose of poor performer, invest in top performers; easily distracted by next object

Early adopter - thoughtful approach to seeing new technology as part of wider trend; has playbook or process for learning and evaluating new tech, 
How marketers can stay informed and become AI fluent
Staying up-to-date on the latest developments in AI and AGI is probably the top thing you can do as a marketer. Understanding capabilities as they are released or even pre-released. This allows you to get a leg up on others and see the potential impact on your company, industry and even job market as a whole. 

My goals would be to understand how AI works, its potential, and limitations. Most marketers don’t have a great grasp on this at all. Invest in learning about AI, ML, deep learning, and related tech. Ultimately try to arm yourself with knowledge to position yourself as a marketing expert in leveraging AI tools to drive revenue.
I think you and are very similar in our approach to this: learn from smart people, and then jump in and experiment and get hands-on experience. Phil, your research process is always fire: who are the smart people you’re learning from? 
People and blogs to follow
There’s waaay smarter people that are tracking this stuff. Not all of these have a marketing lens but they often cover marketing aspects. These are my favorite folks to follow.

We’ll have links to all of their twitter accounts and their newsletters or podcasts in our show notes. 

Ed Gil
https://twitter.com/eladgil 
https://blog.eladgil.com/ 

Ed is an awesome follow on Twitter, he’s an investor and advisor in some of the most well known tech companies like Airbnb, Coinbase, Instacart, OpenDoor, Pinterest, Square, Stripe and others. He worked at Google and Twitter after his company Mixer Labs was acquired. Aside from AI he’s highly in touch with everything tech and startups. He doesn’t post super often but he has a solid blog and he’s the co-host of No Priors podcast that features long form chats with the leading e

What’s up JT, good to chat again. When you aren’t podcasting or consulting, what are you reading or listening to these days?

Yeah I’ve been BUSY. Bobiverse books, of course but also lots of Mario with my kids – haha, my downtime totally spent on guilty pleasures.

Haha yeah you had a head start on Bobiverse but I overlapped you… that’s probably going to change soon for me… I don’t think I’ve announced this on the cast yet but my wife and I are on baby watch, first born arriving at any second now which s why we need to record a few episodes haha

I’ve actually been getting back into podcasts lately. Maybe I’ll plug a few of my favorites ahead of our next episodes. I’ve really been digging Making Sense of Martech lately. Juan Mendoza is the guy behind the podcast, he’s a friend of the show and he’s been doubling down on it, pumping out weekly episodes. If you want to go deep on some technical topics, in episode 37 he had the CEO of Hightouch Data on and he debates the merits of reverse ETL and they really unpack CDPs. Check it out.

In the non marketing podcast world I’ve been taking a dive into the world of AI. No, not fluffy my top 10 ChatGPT prompts and buy my course type of content, way darker shit, like will marketing be replaced by AI in 10 or 20 years… sooner? 

My buddy Alex recommended The Ezra Klein Show. The episode is titled Freaked Out? We Really Can Prepare for A.I. On the show he has Kelsey Piper, a senior writer at Vox. She basically spends her time writing and being ahead of the curve covering advanced A.I.

In that episode she says something like: “The AI community believes that we are 5-10 years away from systems that can do any job you can do remotely. Anything you can do on your computer.”

Recently Goldman Sachs released a report saying AI could replace the equivalent of 300 million jobs. 

A day later Elon Musk, Andrew Yang, Wozniak and several other tech leaders wrote an open letter urging a pause in AI development, citing profound risks. 

So I went down a rabbit hole and it really prompted the next 4 episodes

How fast could AI change or replace marketing jobs?
How marketers can stay informed and become AI fluent
Navigating through AI in your marketing career
Find the top AI marketing tools and filter out the noise

So basically
1. How soon and how significantly will this impact my job
2. How do I keep up with changes?
3. Is it possible to adapt? How can I future-proof myself?
4. How can I start right freaking now?!?

Today we’re going to be starting with setting the scene and covering how fast shit is changing right now. 

Here are some of the topics for this first episode:

AI isn’t new, especially for enterprise companies with lots of dataBut unlocking some of the potential for startups is going to be huge

Will all these advancements just make marketers better and more efficient?or will it actually push founders to go to market without a marketer

Marketing will have massive changes because we primarily rely on the ability to understand and apply existing rules and processes
What does ChatGPT have to say about all this?
What if AI is one day actually able to replicate human creativity and emotional intelligence?
We’ll talk about potential mass unemployment but the more likelihood of new job opportunities
How fast AI has disrupted other jobs already
How AI might simply only ever replace the shitty parts of marketing


Here’s today’s main takeaway: 
It's not like our jobs are gonna vanish overnight, but the shift is happening faster than many of us realize. AI's no longer just a loosely backed buzzword; it's doing things today that we used to think were impossible. So, as marketers, we've gotta take this tech seriously.

Instead of asking if AI's gonna replace our roles in marketing, we should be talking about how quickly it could happen and what it'll look like if it does.

A bunch of really smart marketers (and non marketers) out there are sayin