In the latest episode of the Clarity Digital Podcast, Al Sefati sits down with Mark Kapczynski of Kontrol Media, a seasoned CMO and entrepreneur with a unique blend of corporate and startup experience. Together, they explore the evolving priorities for CMOs in 2025, offering invaluable insights into go-to-market strategies, retention as a growth strategy, and the smart use of AI in marketing.
Key Takeaways from the Podcast: Key Topics for CMOs to Prioritize in 2025 with Mark Kapczynski
pace requires a shift in perspective. This dual capability can unlock new revenue streams and strengthen brand partnerships.
Soft Skills for CMOs: Collaboration and Transparency
Mark underscored the importance of collaboration and transparency in today’s marketing landscape. With the increasing reliance on external teams—agencies, contractors, and technology partners—CMOs must foster an environment of teamwork and shared purpose.
Transparency, while sometimes uncomfortable, is crucial for building trust and enabling others to contribute effectively. Mark noted that being open about challenges or weaknesses can often lead to unexpected solutions and stronger results.
Actionable Advice for Aspiring CMOs
To wrap up the discussion, Mark shared advice for both seasoned and aspiring CMOs:
- Master First-Party Data – As third-party cookies phase out, owning and leveraging first-party data is no longer optional.
- Prioritize Video Content – Video is becoming the dominant format for engagement. Producing high-quality video content at scale can set brands apart.
- Embrace a Holistic View of Marketing – CMOs must look beyond traditional boundaries, taking ownership of areas like payments, support content, and customer retention.
- Focus on Empowerment – Effective CMOs empower their teams, both internal and external, to innovate and execute.
Closing Thoughts
Mark Kapczynski’s insights offer a compelling roadmap for CMOs navigating the complexities of 2025. From mastering retention to leveraging AI and exploring new media networks, the conversation highlights the evolving role of marketing leaders in driving growth and innovation.
Listen to the full podcast for more in-depth strategies and actionable advice to elevate your marketing in 2025!
Transcription
Welcome to the Clarity Digital Podcast! In this episode, I’m thrilled to chat with my longtime colleague and friend, Mark Kapsinski. Mark has a fascinating background, blending his experience as a seasoned CMO with the mindset of a serial entrepreneur. We dive into go-to-market strategies, the power of retention, and even how to cut through the noise with AI. Let’s Dive in.
Hi Mark, welcome to our show. Hey, Al. Good to see you.
Thanks for having me on. Of course. Thank you for making the time for us. For our audience, if you don’t mind introducing yourself, give us background about, pretty much your professional experience. Yeah, sure. I guess I’ll first say that I’ve been a serial entrepreneur as well as A corporate employee.
And I guess when I get tired of doing one, I switched back and forth to the other. So I did a startup right out of college and sold it and then went to work for Microsoft for seven years and got tired of Microsoft and did another startup that was venture backed and sold that, and then went to work for Experian where that’s where you and I connected and got tired of Experian and tried my hand at Yodlee and Then, got involved with a number of companies as a CMO, as you pointed out, and it’s been an interesting ride to go see the world from the lens of a corporate employee, a CMO, and as a entrepreneur.
And somehow I piece all those three things together. And I think that probably what makes you a good CMO is because your entrepreneurial background, it’s not just a corporate background. So you have some real life experience about what it takes to be successful, obviously sold the company.
So that’s really good information. What are you working on these days? Are you running? Are you working for somebody you’re running on? Agency. Yeah. Yeah. So now I run my own. It’s more of a consulting business called control media because I waver between am I an agency or a consulting firm? I think it’s more of a consulting firm that just specializes in marketing and go to market strategy.
And then I guess what we tend to be good at is the execution of it. We typically get called in on projects where companies are trying to figure out either how to grow a new business or bring back new energy into existing lines of business and figure out new ways to generate revenue with like maybe old assets or assets that are been untouched for a while.
And they call us in to figure out like, what can you do with this thing kind of question. And then we come up with some usually creative business ideas as to, okay how do we transform the product? How do we transform the business? And then figure out, okay, what’s the go to market with that to, Actually execute on the plan, I always like to say, vision without execution is called hallucination.
And that’s a famous quote from Thomas Edison. So I always lived by that. But a lot of people can create great PowerPoints, but you got to actually put it to work and deliver on it. And I think that’s something that, I’ve been known for my whole careers. Just gets, I was going to say say it differently, but I’ll say I get stuff done.
That’s awesome. And I think that’s the missing piece for between successful marketing campaigns and the ones that are not successful is not having a proper go to market strategy. For example, I noticed, the clients that we have, the ones that have a CMO or a fractional CMO and we do a lot of execution. We run the Google ads. We do SEO for them, social. They tend to be a lot more successful. The friction is a lot less we enjoy the project a lot more. That highlights the need to having a really good Go to market strategy. So if you don’t mind elaborating a little bit more about how important it is and how different businesses can go about it and And is it a lot different between B2C or B2B?
That would be great. Sure. Yeah, and actually I’d just first like to say that, part of Any go to market strategy is you’re going to need a team and that team can be in house, out of house, agencies, contractors, whatever, but the thing is it’s got to be one team. And I’ve always, I’ve always been fond of working with contractors and agencies and so on, but it’s about bringing them together and treating them just like they’re part of the team, not Oh, you’re an outsider.
So I treat you differently. And that’s how I like my clients to treat me is I just want to feel like I’m part of the team. And I think when you create that healthy environment. Everyone can be successful, like I know a lot of folks, just treat agencies as like we pay the money so they have to do everything we tell them to do.
And, that’s not really fair to them. And so it’s really important to get the most out of people. You have to have a positive relationship that works both ways. And again, that’s whether it’s working with agencies or contractors, et cetera. It’s make sure everyone feels like, They’re part of the team and rewarded as such.
So I’ll say that I’ll get off my soapbox there. But I think a lot of people, a lot of businesses, they’re I don’t want to say desperate, but maybe it is desperate for revenue and growth, right? For whatever reason, right? Maybe they’re falling behind their stock price is low. They’re not, meeting Private equity firms expectations.
And there’s this tremendous pressure on we need to grow. We need to generate more revenue. So how do you do that? And I think that becomes the real part of the answer to the go to market is you need to figure out What are the channels? What are the different ways you’re going to execute on your plan?
So you have to have a plan. I know I work with a lot of folks. It’s just start, doing stuff. And it’s like, how do you I don’t even know how to do that. So you really have to start at the beginning and come up with that strategy, really know who your customers are, where are you going to find them?
And then build that into your, go to market playbook, which becomes here’s the channels that we’re going to operate in. Here’s how we’re going to reach them. And a big piece that gets overlooked is the messaging. Cause again, a lot of people take it. It’s Oh, I just got to have ads run the ads.
It’s what are you going to put in the ads? And a lot of people overlook that. So part of my playbook is, start with strategy. Figure out messaging. And we have, we use something we call a messaging framework that we do for all of our clients. And so we come up with that like little package and then it makes it easier for you to start to execute on.
And it also helps when you’re working with your agency partners or contractors, because now everyone knows the same thing about what you’re going for. So it, a lot of go to market. Isn’t so much the execution. It’s in the planning and the thoughtfulness that goes up front to set yourself up for success on the execution side of things.
And that’s a big piece of that too, with messaging, it’s really figuring out who’s your ideal customer profile, that ICP and truly what are the personas of your customers?
And I think a big thing that people get confused with is personas aren’t. Audience segments in advertising. There are two different things. And so most people go, Oh, here’s my audience segment. So it’s males this, it’s what do they do? What roles do they have? What kind of titles do they have?
You need to understand, truly who you’re going after. And then figure out where those people exist online so that you can go find them and be able to try to get them in the funnel and start working them through to close
it’s interesting. I was working with a consumer products company earlier this year. And that produced mostly products for women. And it was really interesting because a lot of the products seem to be perfectly applicable to, guys like you and me that travel. And I was like, how come you’re not marketing to men?
And it was just I don’t like, we don’t know, like, why aren’t we doing that? It’s I don’t know, maybe you should try it. So it’s it’s really interesting how people, I think once they get into this mode of how they’re acquiring customers or where they’re occurring, that that’s all they can see, and it’s hard to take that step back and go, maybe there’s a different way, or maybe there’s a better way.
Some of my friends and mentors in the industry always told me turn off Facebook ads for a day and see what happens. And, does it make a difference or not? And, it’s sometimes you have to do things like that to just get a real sense of, where you’re at in your programs to get a better feel for what should we be doing next.
I worked with a client and literally they were spending, thousands per month on Facebook and I just wasn’t seeing the results. And I literally told him, let’s turn off Facebook for this entire week and let’s just prove to ourselves if it’s working or not, because I don’t think your data is right.
And sure enough, like there was no material volume difference in their orders. And and, the CEO at the end of the day is you just saved me like 600, 000. It’s yeah, let’s put that money to use somewhere and grow the business, and then that’s where you develop that go to market strategy of let’s really know.
Who the customer is that we’re trying to get or who the influences are that we have to influence and Advocate to and then be able to execute Is there a difference between your methodology when it comes to b2b marketing strategy versus b2c? Really? I think you know, it’s still just marketing and customer acquisition at the end of the day So The timelines and the funnels are different, but the strategy is relatively the same.
It’s, if you don’t know who your customer is, that ICP you’re never going to be successful. So it’s really, find your, find and figure out your ICP. Figure out where those people are and where they exist online, and then, go into those channels to try to reach them and then also reach the influencers that influence those folks.
And, then, B2B, it’s just a longer sale cycle, as right? So there’s more touch points and more things than a, direct transaction. But they’re all relatively the same approach. It’s just, with B2B you just have a longer timeframe and there’s more touch points that you have to worry about.
And ultimately in B2B you have to get to the right buyer too. You could have a, the people that you’re marketing to and interacting with and engaging with could be, internal champions, but they’re not the actual buyer. So you have to help figure out in B2B, who’s the buyer where direct consumer, it’s one to one with the buyer and, you just gotta convince them to purchase in the moment.
Yeah, I think they call it a buyer’s committee on the B2B where there’s a bunch of people you need to target. And one challenge I find in B2B marketing is that different companies have different titles for different people. Like one company I could be a director, another company I could be a senior manager, another company I could be like a CMO or I’ve never been a CMO, but like something else, right?
Oh, Al, you’re always a CMO. Thank you for that.
In one of our calls, you mentioned something about retention, and we’re going to switch over to like more of a like strategy, marketing strategy. You talk about retention being a strategy. I think a lot of marketers are so focused on acquisition that they don’t think about retention.
Yeah, so this is going to be my my big pitch for next year for folks as I’m working on my relationships with clients. We’ll take it more from the Direct to consumer perspective certainly applies to B2B as well, but in direct to consumer especially with subscription oriented businesses and D2C, e com type of businesses like people are so focused on the new acquisition and like you and I were like, I don’t know if you recall this, but at Experian, same way it was like, everyone on the team was focused on new acquisition.
And when I was there, we had one guy who was like, and you, his name was Derek. It was like, Derek, you own retention. And it’s like. How does one guy for, nearly a billion dollar business own retention? And, to me, that just points to people overlook retention or they think of it companies I was advising this year, have this issue of, it’s Oh, we have a tool.
It’s Oh, we have Klaviyo that sends out emails or this other tool that sends out, regular SMS messages. So we’re good. It’s okay, a tool isn’t a strategy and and a methodology, it’s a, it’s simply what it is, a tool that helps get a job done. And so retention is more complicated and it partially why I like to talk about it right now is it’s it’s something that I think.
More CMOs have to evolve into understanding and owning because especially with like subscription businesses like you and I work for experience subscription businesses. There’s a key component in there called payments and most CMOs of companies with subscription businesses do not deal. In payments or worry about payments, yet payments and the payment technologies and the payment rails are incredibly important as part of keeping someone a customer.
And so I have these five pillars of retention. If you want me to talk about it, but yeah, so the five, so the Mark Hepsinski five pillars of retention are communication, the product and user experience. The transaction or payments as we’re talking about community and value and to really be excellent at Retention and taking advantage of it.
It’s really optimizing across those five key pillars And what i’ve been telling my friends fellow cmo’s that have these like digital subscriptions Like if you optimize around retention, it’s the easiest way to get some growth revenue right away And, instead of trying to find new channels of new customer acquisition, that just go after the existing base that you have and get them to either upsell or renew or what, whatever the case may be, buy again if it’s just a D to C econ type of transaction, but retention is the easiest way right now to get new growth revenue that you’re looking for.
It’s just sitting there. And I think Either, CMOs don’t think about it or don’t like dealing in retention or they think low of it. I don’t know what the case may be, the thing is the CMO has got to take responsibility for retention just as much as they do on new customer acquisition.
And the more and the faster that they get it, they’ll see, there’s like low hanging fruit and revenue there. Yeah. Oh, go ahead. No. I can, I understand, but I just want to play devil’s advocate. Let’s say I’m a young, I’m not young, but let’s say I’m a young CMO. And my goal is to grow.
The company’s revenue, but you have people working in a company for a long time that are in charge of the customer service and in charge of other departments. And a lot of the things you’re mentioning it’s their territory, right? And retention. But that’s exactly my point.
Why? Yeah, like why does payments fall under finance when the payments engine is a messaging vehicle and typically the payments engine is the one that’s actually messaging to clients because it has an email component to it, right? And then. It’s typically the engine that’s embedded on the website to get people to enter a new credit card if their credit card declined, or it’s the one that’s doing retries and has a huge impact on user experience, which then leads to conversion.
So that’s exactly my point, which is like, why shouldn’t a CMO own payments? I did a project for this gaming company last year and I took over payments. Yeah. Yeah. Because it’s like, why does this report into finance? Finance just wants to know the numbers and that they got paid, but they don’t know how to manage the payment system because payments is tied to retention.
It’s if we can’t get people to renew, if we can’t process more credit cards, right? We lose all those people. And so you have to have that understanding. And as, as tied to it, I, that’s why I bucket my pillar transactions. Cause it’s not just the payment system, but it’s also, the monetary and pricing factors, what are you going to charge for a product in different countries?
We had a subscription business that was global. And we couldn’t charge the same price in the States, as we did in other countries, right? Other countries don’t have the same kind of disposable income. That we do here. So understanding, how to set pricing levels and discounts and payments, and then it goes even further, which is like payment types.
So in Brazil, you have a lot of different payment types. They don’t want to use debit cards and credit cards. They have digital wallets, like something called boleto. And it’s if you don’t take boleto You’re losing, like probably 50 percent of your revenue opportunity.
And so that’s where, again, it’s like who’s supposed to solve that problem? Like finance isn’t going to know that. And it’s if the CMO doesn’t do it, who else is going to figure that out? How do you approach it though? How do you go to finance and say, Hey, I think this is supposed to be my thing.
It’s pretty much that straightforward. It’s I know more about this than you do. And honestly, usually they’re like, Thank God. Here, take it. Like they’re dealing with way more important things than how to optimize a payment system. That’s not their skillset. They do it because it’s just tied to finance, like another thing tied to this is this gaming company was an international business and a lot of our charges were all rolled into the United States, but then we had to transfer funds to Canada and other places, and it’s we’re paying huge bank fees. Again, it’s the finance doesn’t team doesn’t really know where transactions are occurring and coming from.
They just know, money’s being transferred from one bank to another. The CMO is the one that knows where all the trends the transactions are occurring and, how they can potentially. Help optimize that doesn’t mean, you’re doing it in a vacuum, but you have to work with finance on some of the stuff because you need access to bank accounts and so on.
But all my point is the marketing team and the e comm team needs to know more about things than just Hey, we process an order and I’m done. Can’t be that way. Yeah. I totally I can totally relate to this. I felt like I’ve become a better marketer where I was no much, I was not so much concerned about just conversions and leads.
And I actually went a little bit more in detail and figure out, Hey, what happened to my leads? And why did it not convert? Why did it not become an opportunity or customer? And then, like you mentioned earlier, maybe there’s issue with our pricing, right? Maybe we’re too expensive or just as a price, Problem with the transaction process.
Another thing that I think, and I think this happens a lot in SAS, including some of the common projects that you and I worked on is that support document is still such an afterthought and it’s not a part of the marketing, and I’ve been an SEO guy. I think there’s so much content you can, that’s, that you can provide is like natural FAQs and things like that.
That can really help you track. Generate a lot of good traffic, but a lot of companies tend to not put that within marketing. They give it to somebody else. And that’s not even optimized or looked after. Sometimes they sit on another website. And I think that goes part of the community that you mentioned, right?
Like it’s, that’s another thing where I think marketers and should own the support content that is visible to the customers. It’s part of retention, right? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It’s ultimately up to the CMO and team to go, for lack of a better phrase, take it. It’s, if if you’re not willing to go after it and go get it, then it’s a little bit of your own fault.
Yeah. For not benefiting from it. And no, you’re right. Look, there’s a lot of great content in organizations, but like someone has to go find it and get it and make it accessible so that, it’s properly SEO and referenced and so on and. What I’d also say to that is the vice versus true, which is this is why I’m a huge advocate for this, like messaging framework stuff at the beginning is the customer service department doesn’t know what they don’t know, and so it’s important to share with them, here’s how we’re explaining the product, here’s how we’re messaging it.
So it’s important that the marketing team creates the messaging framework, but then shares it throughout the organization so that the support team is now. Really an extension of marketing. And, it’ll help them be successful too. A lot of these things it’s, it’s not so much a take from them, give to an it’s really more of collaboration and, a lot of times it’s just.
There’s no one to facilitate or lead the collaboration, and I think that’s an opportunity for CMOs to get in there and be like, look, ultimately, we’re about making money. How are we going to make money? And how do we get this whole ship working the same way? And, CEOs are busy their stuff, right?
Ops are handling their stuff. Finance is handling their stuff, right? So it’s who’s in charge of pulling all the rest of the stuff together. And, that’s, I think, both an opportunity and a challenge to CMOs is someone needs to wrangle all this stuff. So go do it.
Yeah, and and, I, I can attest that, I was doing an SEO audit for someone a few months ago, a relatively large company in an internet security space that had completely pulled out the entire support because somehow the marketing team thought that was overshadowing the marketing content.
And what happened is they lost a lot of SEO traffic and SEO leads. And what I, was hypothesis, I did an SEO audit. I’m like, you lost a lot of pages. You lost and those pages had backlinks to them. So they’re very important pages because, there were support pages, people were linking to them.
And then, as you and I, we both know links are really important for SEO. So now they don’t exist anymore. Yeah. Yes. You did do the redirection, but it’s, you still lost a lot of content. That’s probably. Why is your traffic is down and they’re like how do you explain our conversion? We done.
I’m like, I don’t know. You need to ask, you need to do like a questionnaire and see, get some, like a survey. But I, when I want to buy a product especially a SAS product that is pricey like yours. I always look at, see what type of support content I have available because the last thing I need is.
know, paying you money and not finding my way around things. For example, my favorite SEO tool, as is SEMrush because the amount of content that they have on their website, they have a lot of thought leadership content, they have a lot of support content SEO is ever changing to stay on top of the trend.
And and I think there’s something to be said about, CMOs not thinking about just, Promotional things all the time and just adding values to the customers, right? We should go longer retention that you think like I’m a huge fan as you know of HubSpot same thing.
Yeah Great content. I mean you can figure out everything with them and they have great certifications and your products easy to use So, it’s why people stay with it Yeah. So any advice for the new CMOs or people who want to become CMOs? Do you have any tips for them from what standpoint now from from just how to become better CMOs?
I think one of the things you said a long time ago is when I was transitioning away from being a consultant into agency owner, I’m like, Mark, do you have any tips for me? How do I become a better leader? And you said, you don’t have to become a better leader. You just want to, you said you want to empower your team, you want to enable your team, so that was I don’t know if to use those words exactly, but I think that’s what you said.
And and I wanted to see if you have to give any tips to CMOs today. Some, something like high level general, what would it be? Yeah the best advice, there’s I’ll say job specific advice. And then there’s like the soft skills advice.
So maybe take the soft skills first, but, I think it’s back to what I said, maybe at the beginning of the podcast, which is, it’s all about teamwork and, you’re never going to have everyone in house that that, you’re desiring to hire and so on. And, it’s becoming even more fragmented now with more and more technologies and data sets out there where you could never hire enough people internally.
And the key is, how do you still get your job done? But now you’re working with external, entities. And so I think the more you can collaborate better instead of just, leading from top down, right? It’s more enabling those teams whether they’re internal or external to help you is key.
And I think as part of that, one of the biggest things is transparency and let people know where you’re at, where things stand. And, some people are afraid of that, because Maybe they’re not doing so well in certain areas. And so they don’t want to show that. So I think that’s, one of the like mental hurdles that you have to get over of you know what, it is what it is.
And if you don’t show your weaknesses or where the business is less healthy no one can help you then. And so you’re actually doing yourself a disservice, so I think, on the soft skill side, it’s really about teamwork and collaboration that are so critical and evolving with.
With the changing times that, more and more people are remote, more and more, teams are external and, that’s how life works to get things done. And then I’ll say on the flip side of what should CMOs be focusing on or up and coming CMOs should be focusing, I think it’s gets down to two things, it’s first party data and content, and if you’re not doing those things, you’re going to get left way behind and.
I was actually advising a client that I have right now. Cause they don’t have a strong content presence on their site and they’re like, yeah, you keep talking about content, what should we do? Should we just write a blog, build a blog. And, I first, was excited to just be like, yeah, do a blog, let’s do it, and then I actually took a step back and thought about it. I was like, you know what? Like why do a blog like you don’t have much, you don’t have much content. Let’s just go straight to video, right? Let’s just do video. And all the great content that you could produce, let’s produce it as video.
Cause we can always turn it into text based content. But I think, the market is rewarding video now. And, all this idea of like writing. Content text like it’s not rewarded as much on, no one’s reading it anyway. So videos least people are watching and engaging with. So I think, producing video content at scale, it’s key.
And then, as I said, first party data is the absolute must, if you don’t have first party data you’re going to get left behind. Yeah. I, a hundred percent. I agree with you. I think there’s a fear of creating videos. I was afraid of it for a long time, but now we have all these tools available and it’s easy to use.
It’s makes it a lot and you don’t have to overthink it. It could be as easy of creating a webinar or a podcast like this one, right? And what we do is that we usually turn a podcast into, we summarize it, it turns into, it becomes a blog post, and then the podcast would create YouTube short.
So there’s a lot you can do with a video content and that’s right. Yeah, I don’t read as much anymore. Unfortunately, it’s not something good to brag about, but that’s just the direction. This is really therapy session for a lot here today. I love it. Everything’s going well at home. Everything’s going well.
I think I’m just transitioning away from being a an a consultant into an entrepreneur. And I’m learning a lot. So yeah, it is definitely a more of a, I wanna say a class for me right now and I’m learning a lot, so I appreciate that. In one of our calls you brought up this this concept of retail media networks, and we work with a lot of e-commerce and direct to consumer e-commerce, and I think they focus so much on the website and e-commerce which is great, but it sounds like they have an additional opportunity.
Through retail media networks. If you don’t mind explaining to our audience what a retail media network is and how marketers can utilize it. Yeah. So there’s two flavors. There’s a retail media networks and commerce media networks and a retail media network think of it like Amazon, Amazon is a retailer.
And now you can buy tons of ads on their site to promote your product. And in some ways you have to buy ads on Amazon if you want to get anything sold. And so you’re finding a lot of major retailers, including the Walmarts and home depots and others building out. Basically the concept of an ad network.
Home Depot has something called the Orange Apron Network. That basically is their retail media network that, does the same conceptual thing as Amazon. Only because they have physical stores and a physical presence, they can also do some things that are unique and different from Amazon, right?
Where Amazon is purely online, in their channels. The cool thing about Home Depot is they’re physically located in our cities and have employees at the stores and have people to answer questions. Great questions. And the concept of the retail media network is basically an outgrowth of what Amazon started.
And now retailers are finding ways to build their own and do it in a unique way. And then what’s going even further is commerce media networks, which is basically companies who don’t necessarily have a retail kind of presence who aren’t like a physical store like a Home Depot or Walmart or a grocery store like Ralph’s or something.
Think of it like United Airlines, so you can buy media across United, but it’s not just on their website, right? It’s in their app, it’s on the airplane, right? So there’s lots of different ways that now, if you’re interested in engaging with United’s audience, You can do it in a much easier manner than ever before.
And so you have retail media networks on one side, which are typically driven by retailers with retail locations and then commerce media networks that are now driven by major brands that have an interesting collection of digital properties, digital assets, as well as offline assets, United Airlines, because again, back to United, they have their lounges at the airport, and they could do stuff there.
They have the actual airplane that they can put stuff on. They have the person the stewardess, yeah no, they have the app 📍 There are so many different ways now that brands, if that’s their audience that they’re trying to reach, can engage and get more direct to these audiences through these retail or commerce media networks.
And I think that’s super exciting because What’s interesting about it is think of if you’re the CMO of United, like you’re not just on the buy side anymore, you’re on the sell side and that’s like another, like I have to sell ads now. Like, how do I do that? Like I don’t sell anything. I buy things, and so maybe back to your comment on, on, CMOs, what do they have to think about is you have to understand the sell side just as much as. The buy side, because you could be missing opportunities there. And yeah, there’s a lot to unpack there. So if you want to go further, we’d be happy to chat about that more.
But retail media and commerce media networks are just, the hottest thing right now. Yeah, that’s actually a really good great advice there. And I think that since they also have their own really hard loyal customers do. I mean that there’s a lot of opportunity there.
So that’s very exciting time. And the other piece is they have brands that are like directly like wanting this, right? Think of home Depot, how many different brands do they deal with in their stores? Like all the tools, companies and the plants and, lighting and fixtures and plumbing and, Everything, right?
Appliances and stuff like all those brands are just natural fits to augment, you know what they’re doing to drive visibility within, say, Home Depot, and same thing with United, right? They already have corporate partnerships. 📍 and a base of people they’re trying to reach.
So it’s let’s just extend that a little bit further. Into their model. So it’s, there’s like a natural fit for brands that are already working with a retailer a business to extend the relationship and, gain visibility or further awareness into the audience that these networks have access to.
Very cool. Very cool. Yeah, definitely something for many companies to leverage. I guess since we are running short on time, wanted to switch topics to AI. Obviously, that’s the that’s what everybody’s talking about today. And I think it’s reminded me a lot. About the dot com days were like, everybody wanted to have a website, but they had absolutely no idea what to do with it.
How do you cancel the noise and utilize AI as you should as a marketer? Man, that’s a good question, Al. I don’t know. Yeah, how do you, let me simplify it. No, what I was going to say is, you look, there are, everything’s AI now. So I think I, I laugh because, I’ve been dealing with AI for coming up on nearly 20 years.
And it’s It’s just an interesting topic because like you have, like you said, like a lot of young people, newcomers into the space and, thinking AI never existed and it just was invented two years ago. Then there’s old people like me and you that have been dealing with it for years and seeing it evolve.
And many ways it’s just a form of automation. And the real question is what can the automation do for you? And I think that’s where you’re seeing a lot of the best use cases of it is automating things that, couldn’t be done before. There’s a tool that I love to use called evolve AI.
It’s a landing page optimization tool, and it can give you infinite permutations and combinations of assets or elements on a page. And as a marketer, it’s that’s great because I could never create all the A to B tests, to do what they can do on their platform. I can give them a thousand different elements and they’ll mix and match it all up and ultimately determine, what works best for whatever conversion event that I’m trying to achieve.
That’s a great use case for AI because it’s just, I could never. Envision doing it and doing it fast enough to see meaningful results. And so those kinds of things I think are tremendous. Certainly the gen AI stuff’s interesting, it’s it’s, I don’t think it’s there yet, it’s not gonna I’ve talked about this, I think before it’s so it’s a tool, it helps you, but it’s not a replacement. And I think that’s where people get, maybe misaligned around what AI is. It’s it’s not here to replace you. It’s here to help you. It’s a tool. So how do you embrace the tool to be more efficient, more creative, and so on. And I think when you start to apply it that way it can be really useful.
And again, where there’s need for automation and speed then, take advantage of it. I’ll just say this because I deal with a lot of like personalization and recommendations kind of stuff. And I’m a big fan of that as a tech that, tech enablement that needs to be out there more because most, I’ll say personalization and recommendations is more manual, like people don’t realize it, but it’s behind the scenes.
Someone goes into an econ platform and it’s if someone buys this by, selling these three other things. And, I think part of it is like, That’s a great use case to just let the technology. I always like a joke, play old school. It was like, just let the computers do it, and I think personalization and recommendations is huge. There’s a couple of companies that I love working with and they can take on massive volumes of data and then, they’re, better than what a human guess could be. So it’s like, why wouldn’t you, why wouldn’t you use that tech?
Yeah. No, it’s definitely, you want to be in a driver’s seat. You don’t want it to replace you. You use an efficiency tool. We use it a lot. Obviously for brainstorming content when we are creating content, but also we use it a lot for data analysis. I give it a big, huge subset of data, and I’m like, analyze this for me.
This would have taken me or my data scientists like hours a lot of times and I think if you ask the right questions and you provide the right data, you can get pretty good results and automation that you mentioned. So that’s really good. There’s a good amount of application. Go ahead. I think it’s like anything though especially as a senior leader, if you don’t know, What the outcomes relatively should be, then it’s going to be hard for you to use these tools.
I used to work in the film industry when I was younger and that’s what I went to college for. And, like the director on a film knew how to operate the camera, set the lightings, run the electrical, do the audio, even though they weren’t doing that job, they knew how to do all the jobs.
And I think that’s, what’s important back to maybe your CMO question is like, The CMO has to know how all these things work in order to orchestrate them the best to achieve the goals of the business. And I think CMOs who just outsource things blindly, they’re the ones that are missing out because then it’s how do they know what they’re really getting?
How do they know that the answers that AI has given it are really the right answers or so on. And yeah I’ll share a funny story cause I was dealing with Company that specializes in data and analytics as you’re talking about and they’re proud of their platform could, churn through large amounts of data and come up with, results.
And, like it was they showed me some results for I think it was like a hair care, hair coloring company that they were analyzing and their look, blondes buy more of our, of this company’s hair coloring products. I was like, Okay. Cool. Now, what do I do with that? Yeah. And they’re like all they could fall back to was the data point.
Blondes buy more. Yeah. Does that mean I change all my ads to have blondes in it? And they’re going to buy more? And I forget about brunettes and redheads? Or conversely, do I change my ads to be more brunettes? Because I want to grow that market segment? And that’s the problem because even AI can give you a result, but what do you do with it?
What do you do with it? Sure. And that’s still the missing link, which is what do you do with all of this? And that’s where, you need to have some sense of the market sense of, your data and sense of what to experiment with. Yeah that’s really good advice. It just it’s not all about the data, but what you do with that data, right?
Yeah. That example I gave, it’s do we just keep doing what we’re doing and it’s great? Or like what changes? And, like when you start to make changes, like where do we make changes? Do we make it on different platforms, spend more money on Google or versus Meta versus Amazon, I guess a good question.
A question I would ask you, why Blonde by your products more? What’s wrong? Is there something with the messaging? Is there something with the pictures we have on the product? That’s the whole thing. It’s like a data point, it’s almost like you could have said anything, it’s what does it mean?
And what do I do? That still is the missing element to all this. And, maybe AI will get there with better recommendations. But those are like, those are very complex business recommendations. And, even at that, it’s going to, AI can only give you a series and a score, because it doesn’t truly know. So it’ll score things. And then it’s if it gives you a list of top 10 things to do, do you do all of them? Do you do one of them? So what I’m getting at is you need this next level of AI to do like business simulation and that’s hard.
That’s even harder, right? Like all this AI stuff we’re touching is just it’s basic tools, basic automation. And it’s great for what it is, but until you get to This thing can simulate my business and run all these infinite permutations and combinations of different things that we might try to grow our business.
Like you’re not going to be there. The only people that are there are funny enough, like people in formula one. They have so much data and they have to make split decisions that they’re computing these things on like when to bring in their drivers for a pit stop or when to do different things.
It’s like that’s one of the few examples I’ve seen where people are truly simulating business in real time and then adjusting in that specific moment. That’s really good advice. I know we are running out of time for our consumers. If you don’t mind recapping about. Where they can find you, what services you offer, and and where, how they can connect to your website, LinkedIn, that would be great.
Sure, yeah, so again, Mark Kapsinski, I run a boutique consulting firm called Control Media with a K. K O N T R O L Media, and so that’s the website, controlmedia. com, and you can find me on LinkedIn, I’m just Mark cap or my I think I’m the only cap since key on linked in. So maybe my wife is on there, too.
Find either one of us. We run the business together so you can find us there or certainly just call Al and Al knows how to find me. Appreciate it. It’s been a pleasure. I know you and I can talk forever. Maybe we can have you on again later. We can talk about other topics or some of this topic and more elaborate away.
Again, appreciate your time. Thanks for joining us. And until next time, have a good one. Thanks. See ya. Bye. Bye.
