[00:00:25] Speaker A: Hello everyone, I am Paxton Gray, CEO of 97th Floor. 97th Floor is a digital marketing agency built to deliver world class organic and paid channel strategies for mid level and enterprise organizations.
Thank you so much for joining us today for another episode of the Campaign. The Campaign is a marketing podcast about better knowing your audience, innovating beyond best practice and converting visitors into customers. You can find past episodes of the campaign on YouTube, iTunes, Spotify
[email protected].
Today's conversation is a must listen for CMOs navigating the promise and reality of AI adoption. Recent surveys show that CMO optimism around AI is on the rise with 83% feeling positive about its potential investment is following suit. 71% of marketers say they'll invest over 10 million in generative AI within the next three years. Confidence is high, but adoption still limited.
Many leaders are caught up in the gap between awareness and execution. That's where today's guest comes in.
Abby Varma is the founder and principal at Spark Novus Transforming Marketing through AI digital content and brand strategies. He aligns marketing, sales and product teams to drive brand positioning and demand activation.
Known for his strategic vision and energy, Abby builds inclusive, high performing teams. He advances AI and marketing through the Marketing AI sparkcast podcast. And as the founder of the Marketing AI Pulse and Future Crafters communities, Abby is a member of the Forbes Communication Council.
In this episode you're going to learn, number one, the real reasons AI projects stall even with budget and buy in. Number two, how to shift your team from outputs to outcomes. And number three, a four part framework cmos can use to move fast without breaking things. Let's get into it. All right Abby, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm really excited to talk with you.
[00:02:15] Speaker B: Thank you Paxton. Great to be here. Looking forward to it.
[00:02:20] Speaker A: So we are going to dive in deep into AI and AI implementation within organizations. And there's something interesting that you have said before in some other materials which is we have to know like what the right questions to ask are when it comes to AI implementation. And one very common question is can AI do this?
Can it do X or Y thing?
But you're saying that that's the wrong question. Can you tell us more about that? Like why is that the wrong question?
[00:02:51] Speaker B: Absolutely.
I think when you ask that question it puts AI to be the protagonist to the story, which is not the case because guess who is the protagonist? It's us. It's the human being. And I think the right question to really ask is what can I do with AI so it's not so much about what AI can do, it's really, how is AI empowering as human beings in terms of whatever workflows or whatever business outcomes we are seeking? And that subtle mindset shift is such a huge way of starting your AI journey, such a huge way of sort of thinking about AI differently, that it really makes an impact on how people approach AI. Right. Because then your focus is really on your people, on your team, on your business outcomes. And AI is sort of a means to an end.
[00:03:49] Speaker A: Interesting.
So how do you help somebody through that?
How do you help them think about some better questions? Like, do you have any stories there?
[00:03:58] Speaker B: Yeah, no, Absolutely. So one of the most common questions that we get when we engage with CMOs is like, hey, can you help me with AI adoption? And we will ask to do what? And there's an awkward pause very often because they're like, you know, we don't know. You know, my CEO asked me that, hey, what is our AI strategy? Or how do we go about, you know, incorporating AI? But very often people don't really think about the problem that they are looking to solve. I feel when people think about AI, you have to think about AI strategically and responsibly. And what exactly do I mean by that? It means that you've got to make sure that there is value in the way you use AI and value to the business. And our recommendation is really to start with establishing some sort of a strategic North Star business objectives first. Establish whatever they may be. And a lot of business objectives are rooted in sort of two areas. So one is either it's a pain point which you want to mitigate within your organization, within your marketing department, within your company, or it could be an opportunity that you want to leverage that you've never had an opportunity before to do so. Right. So as long as your strategy or your sort of strategic North Star is rooted in both of those things, it is much easier to think about how AI can really solve that problem.
And, you know, I'll give you a real life example without taking names or throwing anybody under the bus, but we've had situations where, you know, we were working with a large enterprise marketing organization. They have about 200 marketers globally, and their entire situation was, hey, we have so many of these use cases, and one of our use cases is the digital asset management system that they've had for a decade or so, and they feel that, hey, sales and marketing can't really find any assets, which a lot of people, a lot of your listeners should be Able to resonate to that, that you have a dam that, you know, people don't use it. And they wanted to really leverage AI to go back in and kind of recategorize all the assets. Perfect use case for AI. AI would be very good at that. The other use cases they were entering with the same set of solution offerings that they had, they were entering a new vertical. And in that example they wanted to use AI for cold prospecting. Right.
Another great use case for AI.
But if you were to really kind of zoom out and think about it, the opportunity for both of these use cases, one is directly tied to business value. I am not saying the digital asset management system was not important, but if you look at the relative importance developing a pipeline for a new vertical that you are entering definitely higher up on the value chain. And that's exactly what they ended up doing as we were working with them, is sort of establishing that pipeline. Demand generation, retention, customer centricity, those were kind of words and values that they were, it was near and dear to them that they wanted to focus on from a, you know, from their strategic North Star, if you will, when it came to their AI initiatives.
And then that's what sort of guided their journey towards what AI solutions to focus on as opposed to using AI for, you know, rewiring their digital asset management system. And maybe, you know, again, it's a relative importance sort of aspect of it. And maybe, you know, they have cycles of six month planning cycles and maybe in a future six month planning cycle that bubbles up to something that is super important in their kind of value order, if you will, within their business value objectives that they're trying to pursue. And if so, absolutely. But I think I always recommend that you really start with the strategy first and start with the people first and not with AI.
[00:08:13] Speaker A: Interesting.
So the strategy part you explained where we're identifying an opportunity to take advantage of or a pain point to relieve. When you say start with the people first, what does that look like?
[00:08:25] Speaker B: Yeah, it's often neglected. You know, everybody wants to. We are at that stage where I feel like, you know, AI ears are like dog ears.
And even though, you know, AI in the current avatar that it's been around in and it hasn't been that long, but you know, from a marketing standpoint, almost near 100% of marketers have been exposed to it and know what it is and have played with ChatGPT or whatever LLM of their choice. Right.
And so that personal experimentation and people's minds are being blown by using you Know, whatever video, Sora and VO3 and what have you in these hundreds of little AI tools.
But to sort of switch and transform your marketing department or your organization or your agency, whatever, whatever that unit is, requires you to really think about transitioning from those individual use cases to more of a, you know, institutional approach on how you could transfer, transform, excuse me, your organization. And that requires investment in people. So that's what I mean. It means change in culture. You have to have a culture for experimentation, try out new things. You got to have a culture for, you know, some element of risk tolerance, right? Like if you're going to adopt AI, it's new for a lot of people and you want to do it for, you know, entire team of 200 people, for example, or however many people you have. You know, start small, experiment. If you're failing, fail fast and move on. Learn from that and that sort of thing. So big mindset shift. So that's number one.
Number two is change management.
That in our experience is sort of the single most overlooked aspect of this AI journey that organizations have, right?
They are just not thinking about.
They're so focused on technology, they're not thinking about their impact on people and what people are thinking. And when we typically work with a company, it's not uncommon for us to start with some sort of a foundational discovery of where everybody is in their personal journey. And it's pretty interesting that we see middle managers typically feel, feel most vulnerable because they feel that, you know, they're going to be replaced with younger AI savvy folks.
The senior executives feel a little lost because they don't have it figured out. They don't know what their quote, unquote, AI infused marketing strategy is going to be. How are they going to leverage it? What does that really mean? There's elements of governance. They're almost afraid of what this may do to their brand if it backfires and that sort of thing. And there's lots of stories there. And then the younger lot feels that the company is not investing in enough training and awareness of how AI should truly be leveraged. And a common thread across all of these, you know, the entire organization is almost guidelines and governance. You know, employees want to do the right things, but they're not aware that, hey, is this okay is for me to do? Is it not okay for me to do? And so there's so many sort of layers to that and that change management is not addressed. And there is obviously things that organizations could do, but there is definitely an element of culture there. And Finally, I would say that the appetite for investing in training is surprisingly quite low. I mean, one would think that marketing leaders or business leaders in general want to invest more in their teams, but that is certainly not keeping pace. And this is true for survey after survey. So you look at state of Marketing, from Salesforce, from Adobe, from the Marketing AI Institute, you name it, all these different studies that are out there, almost all of them point out that, you know, the lack of training and the lack of knowledge is probably the single most recent barrier that, you know, marketers are not thinking about, you know, AI adoption. So I always say that, you know, I have a funny story where somebody, we're talking to an executive and he was like, hey, Abby, if I train my team now, they are AI savvy marketers, the AI trained marketers, and they're going to leave. And I'm like, that's true. You could take that risk. But what if you don't train them and they stay?
Right now that's worse, in my opinion, because now you have a, you know, a bunch of dinosaurs, no offense to dinosaurs, where, you know, they are, you know, they don't know AI. They're. They're struggling to be relevant, those sort of things. So I think, yeah, that's. There's so much, you know, to truly have all these AI initiatives and adoption journeys to be successful, it has to start with people. It has to start with strategy, but it also has to start with people.
[00:13:46] Speaker A: Yeah, Yeah. I think I've also seen organizations where leadership says, like, hey, do this. No limits. Spend whatever you want on whatever tools you want.
And there's still, or even, you know, here's training. And there's, there's even reluctance in those situations, which I think I'm, I'm making it sound like that's illogical, but I actually think some of that resistance is logical. You know, there's the, Is this going to replace me? Is this a threat?
[00:14:17] Speaker B: There's also the.
[00:14:18] Speaker A: It changes so quickly that what's the point? Because if I double down on Grok two weeks later, Grok's now at the bottom of the, the list in terms of what's leading the.
[00:14:28] Speaker B: The pack. Right?
[00:14:29] Speaker A: So I'm just gonna sit and wait until it starts to level out and then I'll invest time. So, like, and I think that's, you know, I don't know that that's the best response, but I think it's at least logical. You can see how somebody would get there. So what can organizations and leaders do to help overcome Even those barriers, when the investment is there, when resources are being sent to training, but adoption is still kind of slow.
[00:14:55] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, that's such a phenomenal question and is frankly a reality that, you know, organizations are facing with today.
And I talk about it in the context of the binomial curve or the proverbial bell curve, right? Like with any sort of technology or innovation wave that sweeps across humanity. We saw the same thing with the Internet. Aging myself here, but you know, where, you know, you'd have your enthusiastic few who are leading the charge, the trailblazers want to get into it and you know, and then on the other end of the spectrum, you have complete skeptics, right? When you know, and they're not, you know, they're not focused on what this may mean, they're more sort of almost insecure and protective of the status quo. Right.
And almost in the case of AI, I'm seeing elements of fear, right? Because they don't fear the unknown. They don't really know what that means. They thinking are they going to be sort of almost incorporating technologies that may make their jobs redundant.
And so those are the two extremes. And then you have the majority, which are kind of in the middle, where you see, and I've seen this directly within an organization during the course of the work that Spark Novis has done, where people will move towards sort of, you know, from healthy skepticism to cautious optimism, very nuanced kind of change in their attitudes.
But at the end of the day, I think it takes a lot of patience on account of organizations to really get the wheels moving. And it has to start at the top. So what can organizations do? Culture. So that to me is a lot and it is a researched fact where leadership, if that shows up in your internal town halls or quarterly meetings or what have you in the way you are setting strategies inside the company and you're making this a priority.
You'll see this is. This will happen more and more and your organization is going to follow suit. Obviously, make sure that you're giving time to. For your organization to get their hands dirty and make mistakes and allocate time, time commitment is a portion of it. And then really have that culture of openness, right? The culture of letting people who are skeptics, letting people voice what they're skeptical about. Like letting people voice and saying that, you know, that they are afraid it's going to take their jobs. And in the surveys that I was alluding to earlier, that is a common theme where we see on average 20 to 30% of the organization in anonymous surveys, mind you will indicate that they're afraid they're going to lose their jobs.
And so a lot of this boils down to that top down approach. Not in terms of like forced adoption, but in terms of setting the vision in sort of a clear manner as to where it is going, where the organization is going, what's the expectation? And really talking about this, you know, the, your, your AI journey as, as a journey towards relevance and towards the future of work. So this is less to do with hey, we're going to get AI in and you know, you're going to lose your job and that sort of thing and acknowledging that. And I'm saying in some instances it may not be possible for CEOs to stand up and say, hey, no one's going to lose their job and a kind of this. But to me, I think it would be important for the CEO to stand up and say that hey, you know, AI is the future and we have, as an organization, we can't be sitting on the sidelines, we've got to adapt to that. And here are some of the things we're doing and making sure that you're communicating that, providing training, providing resources to your team to sort of traverse and change their, you know, their mindset.
An important part of that mindset, which I always sort of, I'm really passionate about this, where there should be recognition of the fact that AI is going to enable people to do things differently, right? Like whatever workflows and that sort of things that are currently in place, it's going to, it's going to let you, making the, it's going to let you change those workflows and make those workflows work differently, but you will also do different things, right? In a real life example is we were working with again a VP of marketing analytics for a big B2C organization and their entire focus for AI adoption was, you know, how can we, how can we take the data and you know, pass the data through data lakes and data pipelines and you know, make sure that the visualization layer that the entire global marketing organization has is done in a manner where, you know, it's done way easier and faster with AI. So that's one way of doing it. You're doing things differently and you're like, okay, we're not taking, you know, humans every step in the loop. Why don't we use AI to accelerate some of those things? But we sort of challenge their assumption and saying, great, that's one way of it, that's One way of thinking about it, where you are doing things differently, but what about if you do it, you do a different thing altogether.
And we worked with them to almost come up with an interface where there is no visualization anymore. It's, it's a, it's a chatbot where marketers can simply quote, unquote, talk to your data. Right where it can be. At the end of the day, that's what those visualizations were serving, was providing insights to the larger marketing organization. And now you're doing it differently, where you can just chat and saying, hey, can you tell me the most successful campaign in the last quarter? And then AI magic works behind the scenes. You still have your data sources, your data pipelines, but it's really giving you that insight served up on a platter. And you don't have to go the traditional route of, you know, data sources, aggregation, visualization, and leave the insights to human beings and that sort of thing. You can, obviously you still, human beings still want to be involved in it, but thinking about this problem in a completely different way. So a great example of where recognition of the fact that we will do things differently, but we will also do different things.
[00:22:09] Speaker A: Yeah, I like that.
[00:22:12] Speaker C: Content production exploded last year thanks to AI tools, and most brands jumped on board. More content meant more chances to rank, right? Well, it's 2025 now and the game has changed dramatically. My name is alonjamello. I'm a senior enterprise SEO specialist at Nice and Floor. And right now we're seeing reputable sites hit with serious penalties.
Google's quality guidelines are actively flagging unhelpful content, and some organizations are losing millions of monthly sessions.
Meanwhile, Google continues tightening crawl budgets across the board. And we don't even need to mention the impact of AI overviews. If your SEO efforts aren't delivering results despite investing in content, you're not alone. The solution may not be creating more content, but strategically consolidating what you already have.
Right now, I'm giving away the tools you need to complete the same content consolidation audit that we use for our very own clients.
This audit reveals what content to consolidate or optimize to support stronger rankings, a cleaner experience, and higher conversions on your site. When we ran this audit for a client with an exceptional social media presence but no search authority, we use the audit recommendations to increase organic revenue by 42%.
Everything you need to get started, including a video walkthrough, a Google Sheets template, and a decision matrix, is linked in the show notes.
Get that heavy content out of your way and watch your site traffic grow. If you'd like help completing the audit on your site, you can get in touch with a marketing
[email protected] LetsTalk.
[00:23:35] Speaker D: Hey everyone, it's Emma Lammy here, content and brand strategist at 97th Floor, and today I'm bringing you the latest in marketing and AI news.
National brands have always wanted stronger connections with local customers, but if you don't have a storefront, that's easier said than done. Yelp thinks they've cracked the code. They've launched local co branded showcase ads, a new ad format that lets national brands, even those without physical locations, team up with local businesses right inside Yelp Search Results here's how it works. Brands like Pepsi or Bilt spotlight their local partners, restaurants, shops, you name it, in photo or video ads that appear when people search on Yelp. It's designed to catch customers in the exact moment they're deciding where to go, while also giving local businesses more visibility at no cost to them.
Pepsi's pilot campaign highlighted restaurants serving their beverages and saw some early wins, a 25% drop in cost per lead for restaurant partners and a bump in visits. Bilt used the ads to promote exclusive member perks at 700 New York City restaurants, which drove over 300,000 visits and boosted page views by more than 5%.
This is a win win. National brands get a way to show real community support and local businesses get more customers walking through the door. Yelp says this is just the beginning. They plan to expand the program to connect more brands, more businesses and more communities.
Next up, the role of the chief marketing officer is changing and in some cases disappearing. A new Forrester Study on Fortune 500 companies finds CMO tenure is slipping down from 4.1 years to just under 4 years, and fewer companies are even using the title.
Only 49% of top marketers now carry the chief marketing officer tag, compared to 55% last year.
Others are rebranding the role as chief revenue officer, chief commercial officer, or splitting the responsibilities across multiple executives. Why? Forrester points to two big tighter budgets in an uncertain economy and the ever expanding scope of the job. Today's marketing leaders are being pulled in every direction brand and demand, product and pipeline, digital and physical. In many companies, those priorities are getting divided among different leaders, which can fragment accountability and push teams toward short term wins over long term strategy.
The study also found industry differences. Healthcare CMOs last the longest, averaging 4.3 years in the role, while those in energy or mining average just over three.
Forrester's takeaway. The CMO seat isn't gone, but it's in flux. Whether it's called marketing revenue or something else entirely, the challenge is the same. Finding a leader who can connect brand building with business growth in a world where the job description keeps shifting. If you need an agency partner to help you manage the monumentous task of running a marketing org, whatever your job title is, connect with
[email protected] to see what's possible for your brand.
Now back to the show that reminds.
[00:26:36] Speaker A: Me of, you know, learning a. A language. The fastest way to learn a new language is to empty your mind of your existing language and to learn a language from scratch. The slowest way to learn a new language is to translate in your mind from your existing language to the new language.
And your concept of having a North Star that we're building toward, I think is a really great thing to hold on to. And then working to develop that skill of emptying my mind of our existing processes the way we've always done them. What I know, and trying to approach it with a beginner's mindset. You know, I was just at a conference, and AI, of course, is the number one thing everyone's talking about. And I sat next to a number of people, actually, that worked for organizations where their leadership, you know, they're on the older end and they're still trying to wrap their minds around social media.
They're. They're so far off from anything in AI.
And so that led me to think, like, you know, in 10 years and 20 years, there will still be people that won't. That will have a. Will resist kind of engaging in this, and a lot of new people enter the workforce where this is all they know, and they will thrive. So how can one transfer from the current state to this new state? And I think what you recommended of having this North Star and then just emptying your mind of preconceived expectations or the way we do things and just building from scratch.
Do you have any, like, thoughts to add to that? Like, how can someone put themselves in the correct mindset so that they're not constantly getting tripped up by the way things have always been done?
[00:28:18] Speaker B: Yeah, 100%. And I sort of alluded to some of those things, but I think, I really think about it in sort of four pillars, right, in terms of that mindset shift.
So the very first thing is what we were talking about at the top of the show, right? Can AI do this? Change that to being. How can I do this with AI? So make yourself the hero, the protagonist of the story, and not AI. Right. I don't know if you've heard of this term. It's called the human AI sandwich, right? Where you have the human being, you have AI and then you have the human being on the other end of it. Right? And that to me is real. You know, maybe that may change in the future.
I know AI is the worst that it would ever be. It's only going to get better as we move into the future. But as things stand today, and in my opinion, for the foreseeable future notwithstanding, you know, completely apocalyptic outcomes of all the AI movies that we see, I feel that human beings are still here to sort of infuse their, you know, creativity and intuition and experiences and, you know, strategic vision and direct AI in a certain way. So that's now we've gone from the human to the AI and then the last part is the human in the loop. Trust but verify to see what comes out of AI and verify that. So to me, I think making sure that you are making that mindset shift from how can AI do this? To how, how can I? Or we do this better with AI. So that's number one.
Number two is I say shift from outputs to outcomes, right?
A lot of people are super excited about the fact that, oh my gosh, like we were churning out 50 blogs a year and now with AI we can churn out 500 blogs a year. That's an output mentality.
They're not thinking about should we, can you? Of course you can. Can you do good quality work? Of course you can. But I'm thinking, you know, if you take your thinking to a higher level of should you, is that really going to make an impact from 50 blogs to 500 blocks? Just because you can so really focus on the outcomes that you want to achieve and then see if AI or utilization of AI is in service of those outcomes.
And if so, sure. But if not, just don't jump in.
Just focused on, you know, outputs.
The third part is my, one of my personal favorites, which is sort of reclaiming that, that shift towards reclaiming the time that we all spend at working. And 40 hour weeks are long gone. Nobody works 40 hour weeks, right? So we are all like 60 hours plus if I was to sort of blur my eyes.
And I think what AI is going to do is allow you to reclaim that time.
And my thought is that reclaim some of that time for your personal life, for your family, for your better half and kids and what have you, relationships. But the other part that you are reclaiming.
Focus on time to think and imagine and lead and inspire people. Centric things, right? So huge shift. And somehow when I see that clicks with people, they suddenly, suddenly become huge believers of AI. They're like, wow, AI is really helping me do more human things. Right?
And finally, the fourth pillar is really embrace ideas that you would have never thought of before. Right off of the discussion thread that we were having just a moment ago about, you know, we're going to do things differently, but also do different things. So be open to the unknown. And the best example of that is think about, you know, Uber. When Uber came about, we had maps, we had the Internet, we had phones, we had apps, right?
Uber took those four ingredients that were already there and completely changed the world as we know it. Like, the whole concept of Uberization of commerce or uberization of societies is now something that we were like, wow, we can. We cannot live without that. But imagine the same example in the context of AI. What will AI bring to us like, that? We don't even know. We can't even conceive as humanity. Be open to that, right? So I think those four things are critical things.
Critical, critical pillars in that mindset, mindset shift that we should all take a moment to really absorb.
[00:33:12] Speaker A: What a great framework. I'm wondering, would you mind repeating that framework and just saying.12, because I want people to make sure they take this away.
[00:33:22] Speaker B: Yeah, happy to. So the first is really shift from can AI do this? To what can I do with AI?
The second is shift from outputs to outcomes.
The third is the shift towards reclaiming time to think, imagine lead and inspire.
And the fourth is shift towards embracing ideas that we would have never considered otherwise.
[00:33:52] Speaker A: I love that. So you, you founded Spark Novus to help marketing leaders learn how to use AI. I want to know what was your journey into AI and like, where are you at? Where do you feel like you're at in the. In the stage of adopting it for yourself?
[00:34:09] Speaker B: Yeah, I would add, I. I would answer the second question before, which is I am a. A humble learner. Like, like a lot of people are like, oh, Abby, you're the AI expert. I'm like, far from it. If, in fact, I say that if anybody claims they're an AI expert, I would like one far, far away. There's a handful of AI experts who really pioneering this field. Absolutely AI experts. But for a lot of folks who are taking AI and applying it in various fields, the word expert is used way too casually these days. And I am definitely not that really a humble learner is the way I think about myself and my journey towards AI. I founded sparknows about two years ago.
I caught the AI bug.
It was all a coincidence at a very interesting time, which happened to be just before COVID the company I used to work for, you know, we were looking into. It was an R and D project back then, you know, machine learning. And it was so new as a concept, hence it was part of the R and D organization.
And it was something that, you know, I was sort of exposed to as part of, you know, taking that kind of machine learning and artificial intelligence narrative and working that into our innovation story, which the company I used to work for was, was very heavily into innovation and really, you know, I was really proud of that. And so as part of that, got exposed to machine learning and artificial intelligence and that was it. I was sort of hooked, line and sinkered and as all of us had a plan, you know, had plenty of time during COVID I just sort of immersed myself in there and it just, you know, blew my mind. I started getting my hands dirty playing with things and I just thought that this is going to change the way marketing and sales is going to, and business frankly is going to, is going to operate in the future. And then there was that and then came ChatGPT and it just sort of blew up and exploded to what we know right now, to where you can't really imagine, you know, how humanity is kind of dealing with this, right? Like you have 7 million users who use ChatGPT on a, on a daily basis, which is insane, right? Like, which is ridiculous. So, so I think that whole transition of how people are. Sorry, I meant 700 million, that was a mistake.
700 million users using chat GPT. And this is, this has been in a very short span of time, right, three years or so, and, and so I think less than three years, actually 32 months. I remember watching the Sam Altman Launch for chat GPT5 yesterday and it's just incredible to see how that has exploded. So it's just a very, I feel a great spot for Spark Novus to, you know, to be in. We've been fortunate where we've been trusted with sort of helping marketers embark on this journey. And in our approach is a journey towards adoption to self reliance, right? That's sort of a focus of what we do. We do, you know, we help with strategy, we do a lot of educational literacy, we also do implementation work, but really at the end of the day it's really making sure. That we are empowering marketers towards what that, you know, the future of work is going to be, the future of marketing is going to be.
[00:37:57] Speaker A: I love that.
I'm sure there's somebody listening right now who's just feeling inspired and saying, you know what? I really need to dive in more.
What is maybe one more piece of advice or nugget you'd offer to that person who is just feeling motivated, but maybe doesn't know quite what to do next on their, like, individual journey now?
[00:38:18] Speaker B: Great, great question. And it is a very common scenario, to be honest. I feel that, you know, you can't say a sentence in the business world these days without saying AI. You can't open up LinkedIn without really seeing AI. And the result of that there is people are getting turned off, right? There's people are getting overwhelmed and getting turned off. So you have the, you know, the FOMO people on one end of the spectrum and the people who are completely immersed. But my recommendation to people is twofold. So one is dip your toes, right? Do not get overwhelmed. There's lots of resources in terms of how you can embark on your journey and move along. Like if you've already started it, which a lot of people have, you know, lots of free resources just go to. If you were to go to Coursera, for example, there's lots, tons and tons of free formalized AI courses that, you know, you could do if that is too much and you don't have that kind of time commitment. My recommendation is depending on whatever your field is, follow the influencers in your field. And I don't mean the.
I don't mean the tiktokers and the Instagrammers who are talking about the, you know, the next best things in slice spread in terms of zapier templates. I don't mean those sort of folks, but I mean genuine business leaders within your field. Within marketing, for example, there's lots of those.
There's Paul Raitzer from the Marketing Institute.
There's Nicole Leffler who talks about ChatGPT. There's a lot of these sort of folks who you could really follow and learn. And that's a great way where you don't have to worry about the noise. You just follow these people within, you know, within that world of yours who will sort of curate, collate, curate and present those offerings to you. So you have to, don't be afraid, dip in, dip your toes in, Follow people in terms of doing that and really invest in yourself. So this is for, you know, the middle managers and the senior executives out there.
Invest in yourself, invest in your team. Right? Formalize. Make sure that you are saving up investment dollars in training up your team. Believe me, it is going to pay dividends.
[00:40:44] Speaker A: I love that. Abby, thank you so much for being here. This has been a really great discussion. I love that framework.
We will make sure that that framework is laid out in the show notes. And for people who want to learn more, what's the best way for them to connect with you?
[00:41:01] Speaker B: Yeah, I would say, you know, hit me up on LinkedIn Abby Varma a B Y V A R M A hit me up on LinkedIn. Or you could go to sparknovas.com S B A R K N O V U S sparknovas.com Easy Places we also host a marketing AI community.
It's called Marketing AI Pulse. So if you can go to marketingai pulse.com you'll see that that community has really exploded. You know, we're, we haven't even celebrated a one year anniversary. We started from like 30 people, you know, meeting up at for coffee or drinks to now that community is about 600 people in less than a year. So it's phenomenal. We do a lot of online, you know, webinars, learnings, in person, events, training, certification. So lots of opportunities for you guys to learn from there as well. So marketing, Yapple, stock market.
[00:41:54] Speaker A: Okay, I love that. Abby, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing what you've learned.
[00:41:59] Speaker B: Thank you.
Yep, thank you very much for having me. It's been a pleasure.
[00:42:05] Speaker A: All right, that is it for today everybody. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving us a five star rating and subscribe so that you don't miss future episodes.
Big thank you to Abby Varma for joining us today. You can find Abby on LinkedIn if you talk with him more about using AI in marketing.
Some major takeaways from this episode include number one, start AI initiatives with a strategic North Star based on business objectives. Number two, communicate the vision of AI with your team clearly to increase adoption across your organization. And number three, follow AI influencers in your area of expertise. Take advantage of what's being shared and don't feel like you need to do this on your own.
So many great ideas in this episode. I hope you took something with you that you can implement to help your team accelerate their use of AI.
You can find past episodes of the campaign and other marketing content at 97th floor.com. also, you can learn more about the agency and get in touch with a marketing specialist if you want support for your own marketing campaigns.
That's it for now. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you back here next week. Until then, keep innovating, keep converting.
[00:43:14] Speaker B: It.
