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Episode Overview:
Reid Carr: Most marketers are still experimenting with AI. Today's guest didn't experiment. She transformed an entire business school around it. Poets and quants called it the most consequential AI transformation in business education. So what does that actually mean operationally? And what happens when a CMO decides AI isn't a tool, but infrastructure? Today, we're joined by Katya Papova, Chief Marketing Officer at the Kogod School of Business at American University. Katya, welcome to the show.Katya Popova: Thanks for having me.
Reid Carr: Absolutely.
- What problem are you really being hired to solve as a CMO?
- What did managing 200-plus brands teach you about scale and discipline?
- What changes when you move from corporate marketing into higher education?
- What does AI transformation actually look like inside a marketing team?
- How do you integrate AI without breaking what already works?
- What are marketers getting wrong about LLM visibility?
- How should teams measure answer engine visibility?
- Where is the modern CMO role headed next?
- What is overhyped, and what are marketers still not paying enough attention to?
- Which AI tools are actually worth using right now?
- What skill or practice will matter most over the next 24 months?
- Final thoughts & key takeaways
Episode Transcript:
What problem are you really being hired to solve as a CMO?
Reid Carr: Well, so you've led marketing transformations at Rice, at Fortune 500 Company, and now at Kogod. When you look back at over 15 years, what's the pattern and what problem do you keep hiring people to solve? Is it brand? Is it systems? Culture? What is it?Katya Popova: Yeah, it's interesting. I've been reflecting a lot on this question just because I'm curious about it. And what I've found is that I always get hired to fix a website, which is so ironic because that is just a question that I always get asked, "Can you fix the website?" But I've always thought that this is just a front to understanding how an organization actually works and what problems this organization has. So I think it's like the way to think about it is they hire me for the website, they end up with a new culture on the other side of it. And I'm not just talking about what a website looks like. I think that's part of it, but it also has to do with how it's structured, what's the data infrastructure, what's the intelligence behind it. They don't really think about that when they hire me. They just say, "I need a new website," but that is the process that takes you through solving for a website problem. I love these projects for that reason.
So the common thread is I've always been hired for the website. The common result has always been on the other side of it. There's a different culture that thinks differently about what marketing does and what Roy has to do with technology and with just where it fits within the entire organization. I think it's kind of my back door into fixing organizational culture.
Reid Carr: Yeah. So from a website standpoint, is that because you have to open every door and uncover everything? You find history and legacy?
Katya Popova: Oh my gosh, yes. Every closet is in the website, somehow present. It is fascinating to think of as a concept of how easy it is to slide into an organization through that problem. But yes, every single problem and every single opportunity is obvious through a website project because you have to organize yourself in every way. Technology, strategy, return it, what is the actual value proposition of your organization? Every one of those things needs to be very clear in order for you to deliver a good website. So I think it's such a great excuse for you to diagnose everything that's wrong with an organization and then come back and say, "This is what I fixed."
Reid Carr: Yeah. So you heard it here first. The way to fix culture is by building a new website.
Katya Popova: Hahaha hot take, sure haha.
What did managing 200-plus brands teach you about scale and discipline?
Reid Carr: Okay. Well, so looking back at NOV or National Oilwell Varco, you worked across 200 plus brands in a complex industrial environment. Now that's not glamorous marketing by any stretch. I think that's operational marketing, I would say. I mean, what did that experience teach you about scale and discipline that maybe most CMOs in higher ed probably don't have?Katya Popova: Oh, goodness. I do think as CMOs in higher ed do deal with a lot of complexity too. It might be just of a different nature. So I would never want to assume that they don't have it. What I think that it did was it gave me a crash course on how to show restraint because there's a very strange thing when it comes to brand, right? You have to have a very strong, solid foundation, but it has to also flex. There's so many edge cases that require a decision for a brand all the time, especially when you have 200 plus brands.
And what I like to think of, you don't want the brand to wobble. Very technical term for it, but you want it to be able to flex. And the sad part of that is that I don't think this is a scientific formula. A lot of it is, 'I'll know it when I see it' kind of thing. So being dropped into a very big project like that, working with very experienced partners and learning along the way of this is how you flex without wobbling, that was the skill that came out of that experience. And it is a very, again, it's not a very scientific process. So unless you've had a chance to see, okay, we pushed it too far. This no longer is brand additive. It does not honor the brand, but you won't know it until you've experienced it. So I think that experience just gave me the instinct to know what's a wobble versus a flex for a brand. And I'm so sorry. I know this is not a technical term, but this is how I envision it.
Reid Carr: No, I mean, I think that equates pretty well. You think about that in the sports idea, right? If you come from a strong foundation, your strength can come from that because it's very difficult in a wobble to have an athletic move come from that, that you don't break your ankles or something. So I mean, if you're building that strong foundation, I think that term, I think if it's not a technical term, it should be.
Katya Popova: There you go.
Reid Carr: Yeah, exactly.
What changes when you move from corporate marketing into higher education?
Reid Carr: So when you moved into higher education now at Rice and American University, did you feel like you were moving into a slower moving environment? I mean, what was the first kind of 'this needs to change' kind of moment? And then how did you kind of accelerate through that with any kind of velocity?Katya Popova: So yes, academia is slow. It's like whenever you move from corporate America into academia, you feel like the giant fish in a tiny pond. But I will say upon reflection, it's slow for an interesting reason. So a corporation of the size that I used to work in for-profit was slow because there's just a ton of stakeholders that you need to bring along for big decisions. So we're talking about 60 countries stakeholders to buy into what does one layout for an international page look like? That takes time, but it's a stakeholder management thing.
With academia where I ran into some issues is bureaucratic speed bumps. It's not the stakeholder speed bumps as much as it is bureaucracy. You got to fill out this form. You got to wait for this many RFPs to come back. You have to justify it in this way. The budget, let's talk about budget. How long does it take to approve money to justify the spend? So what I've seen is that there's speed bumps in both, but the academic ones are bureaucratic, which are infuriating because you cannot manage your way around them. You just got to do it. And probably one of the bigger aha moments for both of my academic experiences have been just the sheer lack of technology fluency, none.
Again, I get hired to do a marketing website and I say, "Well, we need a CRM." How are those two things created equal? But that is your way into understanding they don't have a marketing technology stack. Okay, so let's start there. The first day that I had at American University, I asked the admissions team, "Okay, so how do you divide the enrollment funnel in stages?" And I was given, "we don't have that." So one of the first thing that we sat down was, "Okay, let's talk about the enrollment funnel. What are the different stages? How do you define them? What do you measure as a conversion rate between them?" These are kind of definitions that you need to start with. But now we have a full stack of marketing automation, CMS, CRM. I mean, the sophistication has grown significantly, but it took a lot of work to build it from scratch because it just didn't exist.
Reid Carr: Well, I mean, and that's kind of the, technical transformation.
What does AI transformation actually look like inside a marketing team?
Reid Carr: I think we also want to talk about the AI transformation over at Kogod as well. I mean, what you're talking about, there's the technical components of it, but you had to kind of change hearts, minds, and culture to get there. Now, talking about AI transformation at Kogod, when we say AI transformation, are we talking about the tools layered on to marketing or redesign of how marketing actually functions? So maybe you can walk us through what changed structurally in the workflow, how you organize the team.Katya Popova: So this is fun. We grew up along AI. So I think that the way we experienced AI implementation will probably be very different for someone who's just starting that journey right now, just because the sheer amount of tools available to you is mind blowing right now. When we started, it was ChatGPT, right? Oh, are you using ChatGPT? Not yet, let me start that.
But the way I think about it is there are three ways in which AI is very big for the Kogod School of Business. Number one is the product itself. So we have really melted AI into everything that we teach our students, and that's a big product thing that we need to talk about to our students, to media, et cetera. So the content area is one, but when it comes to us as a marketing team, there are two facets that are also very important. Number one is obviously the tools that we use. So on average, I think that my team on a daily basis uses between 12 to 15 AI tools as we speak today. And then there's the third stool leg, which would be marketing to AI. So accommodating for this idea that AI now is an audience you need to market to because the consumer behavior is shifting to that.
Reid Carr: I don't think people realize that as much either.
Katya Popova: Well, I mean, I think the people are starting to realize that because I will tell you what, in my attribution analysis, I have AI chatbots as attribution to enrollments already. That's the original first touch attribution that I see in my system, which blows my mind, but we are already seeing that. And because consideration cycle for my product is 18 months. So I already see attribution for AI Chatbots. So the consumer is there. So it's all about us keeping up with that.
And in terms of whether it's changed our workflows, the team has not changed its structure. So we are using the same structure in terms of content creation, editorial. What has changed are two things in my mind. Number one is what it's done to unlock creativity for the team and just what the imagination does for the team. Because what AI effectively does is it gives you access to cheap labor, right? It gives you access to scale that you may have never had before. I don't have five videographers. I have one. I don't have seven writers. I have two. So having access to something that can just scale your productivity is fantastic. But AI unchecked and without strong ideation behind it from a human is slop. I mean, this is nothing new that I'm sharing here. It is not valuable.
So our human first approach still stands where we see AI is kind of relieve us from the strain of having to produce a ton with the limited humans that we do have. So it finally opened up this area of possibilities of, "You know what? I can dream now. I can do some crazy stuff with AI and I have access to it for a very, very small fee." That has just unlocked the potential of ideation so much.
And then the second thing that has done is it's just kind of taking care of the mundane, crappy things that we don't want to worry about. Note taking, which sounds so stupid, but it's such a labor intensive process. We can have some brilliant ideas in a conversation and they'll be lost forever because nobody was taking notes. That small example of, "My gosh, I had the tagline and I said in the meeting and nobody can remember it," which is maybe not a good sign for a good tagline, but the idea there is, it captures so much that we'd lost in the imperfect human memory that we have. And I think that this is a small example of it can absolutely supercharge your capability of just being a human without worrying about the administrative part of it.
How do you integrate AI without breaking what already works?
Reid Carr: Yeah. Well, so I mean, now you were just talking about this, but kind of maybe dig deeper into it is integrating AI. I mean, CMOs, you want AI, but you don't want the chaos that can come from it. How do you integrate AI into the existing ... You talked about the people, but the tools, the CRM, the marketing systems without breaking what is already working. Where did you start and what did you not automate, I guess, is also important, and what resistance did you encounter along the way, whether technical or otherwise?Katya Popova: I'm trying to think of the resistance and working at a university that produces a lot of original knowledge, there was that initial instinct of, "Oh no, I don't want AI involved in any of this. " But we've been very disciplined about the human first piece. So that's the one thing that always, I think, especially in the world that I live, is always the first rule. It needs to come from a human as an idea. I do not outsource ideation to AI because I think it muddies the waters. It naturally will lead you to the average answer and not the outstanding answer. So AI is very powerful, but I just don't find it to be powerful enough for ideation and creativity. The human is that holds the key to creativity and imagination, but then what AI can do is scale it for you and make it palpable for the 15 different audiences you want to approach that they need that little tiny tweak for the idea that makes it more powerful for them.
So going back to where do you start in this world of overwhelm? I think that the most important thing is to narrow the scope of a problem you're trying to solve. Narrow it as much as you can so that you can experiment, put a hypothesis together and test it out to see if it makes sense or not. So that's the first approach. So one problem, note taking, right? Such a silly example, but it is an easy example to grasp. Note taking is a problem. We suck at it. We as creatives suck at note taking. All right, we got Notion, it's taking all the notes for us. It's giving us all a lot to do. So it feeds into our project management system. We're done. You don't have to worry about this. But then when you pull back, now we are somewhat lucky that our technology stack is fully integrated. I don't know if I'm allowed to say what it is, but I will tell you what it is. It's HubSpot. We can cut that out later on. So HubSpot specifically rolled out AI tools within its suite and we were able to enjoy that automatically without me freaking out that this is going to break something because the testing has been done before I've had to do it.
That said, I will note that before HubSpot did that, what I have been doing is extracting data from my CRM and then anonymizing it because I do have to work within certain parameters as a higher education marketer, anonymizing it and then working with the data sets within an AI agent or an AI chatbot to extrapolate some stuff from it. So the very first thing that I would recommend if you're just dipping your toes in the water is grab as much CRM data as you can. If you have to anonymize it, go for it. If you don't have to. If you have a paid plan that protects that anonymity for you, fantastic. But start playing with your target audiences. Let AI find the patterns for you because if you have large data sets, a human cannot possibly do that for you.
So deploy the AI agent, see what it sees, see what it comes back with, and then start playing with that. I think this is a small way of you kind of walking into systems thinking without endangering breaking your architecture down, without you coding anything, heaven forbid. We've heard the bad cases happening right now. Don't touch that. Just extract some data, play with it within an agent or chatbot, whatever feeds your soul, and then see what that comes back with. And then you can ask follow-up questions, et cetera.
The other place that I would recommend doing this is use the audio and voice mode of any of the tools that you have access to and ask it to interview you because that is one thing I would say AI is very good at. It's not very good at telling you what's creative and what's good taste, but it's very good about asking you questions. And you can ask it to ask you a hundred questions and then it's you still the source of the ideas, but then it can help you figure out what to do with those going forward.
Reid Carr: So now my job is no longer safe here behind this mic hahaha.
Katya Popova: None of our jobs are safe behind these mics, I think. Let's be honest about that hahaha.
Reid Carr: That's fair. Well, it was fun while it lasted hahaha. So through all this, I mean, obviously people are looking for improvements and gains. What operational gains have you actually seen? Because not that it's just efficient. I mean, we're talking speed to campaign, lead scoring accuracy, cost saving. What's standing out to you without getting even into specific insights, I imagine that there are unique to you.
Katya Popova: Well, lead scoring would be a great one to talk about because we didn't have any before. So now we actually have access to lead scoring that is really empowering our admissions team to prioritize their time.
In a world of a shrinking market like higher ed, it is an incredibly competitive market, incredibly competitive market. It's expensive to market and it's just every year it's getting tougher and tougher. So your admissions team is your sales team. This is the most precious resource you have because it's that one-to-one communication that really leads somebody from, "I'm interested in you, " to, "I'm depositing and coming to your school." So us being very respectful of their time is my number one priority. We do have AI prioritizing all that for us. So yes, it asked us what parameters we need to use to prioritize those leads, but it does it for us and it gives a sales/admissions person a very clear objective of, "I need to talk to these five people today." That is huge.
We had attempted a human-based model of predicting, "Hey, if they opened this webpage, we should give them this score. If they open this email..." it was highly ineffective. Because we as humans have a tendency to be myopic, right? That's what I think is valuable. But when you deploy an AI to think of what is an actually valuable activity based on all the attribution that we have access to in our system, you realize that not everybody's the same, not everybody values the same assets as you do, and that was fantastic for us to deploy.
Reid Carr: Yeah. Well, I mean, it becomes much more audience centric. I think that's where a lot of people get hung up on is what are these things I have done and how do I score what I have done, which is the page view, the whatever. But I mean, at the end of the day, it's we are going to be most valuable to them actually in many respects.
Katya Popova: Exactly.
What are marketers getting wrong about LLM visibility?
Reid Carr: Well, okay. So going back to the LLM side of stuff, brand visibility, because we talked a little bit about that, is answer engine optimization. For marketers listening, what's the biggest misconception about showing up in ChatGPT, Gemini Claude on the LLMs, like what you're doing on that side of things?Katya Popova: So this is fascinating. It is evolving as we speak. Maybe I would say 12 months ago, it was all about what you say about yourself. That's where engines took most of their information. About 70% of what they gave you was based on what you said about yourself. And it's evolved based on real life feedback. Now it's a lot more valuable about what other people say about you. So in higher ed specifically, that means media, that means rankings. These are the third party validators that agree with you that you're the best at something or very good at something.
And answer engines tend to follow that lead. They have a lot of incentive to be as correct as possible. They get a lot of crap for not being very correct and there's a lot of incentive for them to continue that. And the only way for them to do this is the more validation there is about the statements that you're making, the better. So one of the biggest strategies is yes, we are drafting the narrative of what we want to be known for, but then the heavy lift happens on PR, the heavy lift happens on rankings for us in terms of validation. We have a US News & World report ranking coming out in two weeks. It's a huge deal for us. It's a huge deal for us and I'm very excited about the result that we got this year and we're going to make a big deal about this. So that is the number one step.
But then the other step, there is a technical component to it. So you cannot ignore it. These are machines that are reading your content, but they don't read like you and I read.
And having a basic understanding of how LLMs work is very, very helpful. I will not be the one teaching you that because I'm not a professor in that regard. Lots of videos out there if you want to learn about how LLMs learn, because I think it's important for you to know how they learn. What it really means is that you need to start writing a little bit differently to accommodate their style of reading. So that's the number one thing that I took away and that we've been implementing on all of our website and all of our content areas. That includes social media content, by the way, because that is a huge search engine these days. So how do we write? So it takes a specific kind of writing in terms of every paragraph needs to be fairly self-sustained. So there's some technical components to it.
And then there's the schema piece of it, which is again, a more technical term, but is it particularly the backend of, it tells the LLM what this page is about. That also needs to be optimized and that has given us huge gains in our visibility into search engines, not search, answer engines. I'm even correcting myself.
Reid Carr: Well, I mean both technically.
Katya Popova: Absolutely. So a lot of the SEO approaches work in AEO, but I think that third party validation is this new giant beast that if you're not ahead of it, you'll show up in chatbots. And the last thing that I would say is chatbots love comparison queries. They don't like talking about the best. They like to weigh their answers. So compared to this, compared to that. So investing in a lot of content that does that comparison for them so they don't have to do it is very helpful as well. So that's just a little trick of the trade that's making sense now. It might not make sense when this podcast goes live.
Reid Carr: Hahaha yeah, exactly. We better get this out as soon as possible, but then we're not talking about comparison engine optimization hahaha.
How should teams measure answer engine visibility?
Reid Carr: Well, so then obviously on the back end of all this stuff is then the measurement component of it. I mean, how are you or how are teams measuring LLM visibility?Katya Popova: There are a few tools out there that can help you with that. We use HubSpot AO Optimizers ourselves, but there are a few tools I think that you guys provide a tool too, which is, to me, that is so precious and so important. We tend to do this on a monthly basis. We track how we ranked on three engines right now. We look at Perplexity, we look at Google Gemini and we look at OpenAI, so ChatGPT. These are the three that we followed the most. And it's fascinating to see how we increase in one, decrease in another, like trying to game it. You're not really gaming it. You're really trying to improve hopefully all three. So seeing that movement is where I think you have to focus. There are tools out there, highly recommended people look into it. It is something that we folded very much systematically in how we evaluate success.
I also look at our referrals on the website. It's growing right now. I'm getting a ton of traffic from OpenAI. This is by a thousand X compared to the other engines so I have a lot of work to do on Google, a lot of work to do on Gemini.
Reid Carr: Yeah. I mean, and it's interesting right now. I mean, that's the game we're playing. I mean, we used to play that game a lot more in SEO and then it became pretty ... Google being the dominant force there. And obviously we're back in that world again. I mean, it's also interesting too because you're probably to some degree also battling accuracy. So people can come in and be referred to you by one of these, but also may come on inaccurate information if it's not managed properly. So are you doing anything there to kind of monitor the accuracy of how these engines are talking about you?
Katya Popova: Oh, that's a great question. Not so much on the agents. I'll be very honest. I would think that this is a fantastic question, but I will tell you a funny story. We do have an AI agent on our website, which is technically trained on all of our webpages. There's a bunch of backend documentation for it. It's hypothetically very well trained chatbot. Just today, I got a note saying, "Hey, your chatbot said your Amazon marketing starts in the spring and it doesn't."
Reid Carr: Oh, no.
Katya Popova: So okay. I mean, it is to some degree of black box, which is why there's always a statement of check with a human after you get this answer. So we do have some parameters of keeping track of whether our AI chatbot is selling the truth or not. We're told when it's not, but the accuracy on the engines, I don't have a solution for, I don't know if you do, but not at this point.
Reid Carr: Well, I mean, I think you kind of hearing that folks tell you what's happening and what they came on. There's some funny stories about people showing up at resort locations saying, "I'm here for the hot springs" and they don't have them and things like that.
Katya Popova: It can be comic.
Reid Carr: Yeah, exactly. And bathing suit and towel, nope, nope, wrong place.
Katya Popova: AI fail.
Reid Carr: Exactly. And so I think consumer, average consumers starting to understand and maybe realize that there is going to be some of that as well. I think being, obviously the chat bots on a website designating that this is not a live human being. The reality is how many times we've also had fails from live human beings who have incorrect information.
Katya Popova: Probably more than the machines to be fair hahaha.
Reid Carr: You said there was a reservation, you didn't hold the reservation? Yeah. So I think it's going to be an evolution for sure. And I think as a lot of marketers kind of wash their hands of some of that saying, "Well, that's kind of the role of the chatbots themselves or LLMs and things." But I think it's a battle that everyone, the whole industry is fighting to some degree because accuracy is important everywhere.
Katya Popova: Sure, Sure.
Reid Carr: But I think this starts to speak a bit to where are things going. I think you're operating at the intersection of marketing, technology and academia, which tends to be a place where a lot of this stuff is studied or dreamed up.
Where is the modern CMO role headed next?
Reid Carr: I mean, where do you think the modern CMO role is headed? Is this kind of about revenue operations, system architecture, AI ethicist, change manager? I mean, there's all these different roles.Katya Popova: The swiss knife of everything, right?
Reid Carr: Well, I mean, I think that's what a lot of CMOs have historically seen themselves as that. But it was interesting because some of the earlier stuff you had said earlier too was there's all sorts of infusion of classic stuff, PR, messaging, building the website. All those things remain critically important, but now we're headed in this new direction where there are underpinnings of technology, AI, obviously management, culture. You brought that up at the website. So you can't expect the CMO to wear all the hats, but it sounds a lot like they are. I mean, where do you think it's headed?
Katya Popova: Yeah. Okay. Another hot take. I actually think it's going to be more about brand than anything else. AI is making things cheap. It's commoditizing everything. So the fact that you are able to produce a hundred variations of your long form content piece, that makes it cheaper and there's going to be a lot more available. So that when you strip away that commodity, what's left? And that becomes, I think, where the humans are, what do humans buy? I mean, watch Simon Sinek's conversation on TED. They buy why you do things, not what you do, not what your differentiators are. They buy why you do things, value-based marketing. So what your brand story is, is going to be even more important in this world. Now, I'm not saying that any of the other things that you said are not important. If you don't know how to put up a marketing technology stack in place, okay, maybe you don't as a CMO, but hire somebody who does, because the technology component needs to be there. You need the intelligence to understand what's working, what's not working. You need to have the technology, but I would say if you don't have a good story to tell, no technology is going to save you.
So I personally think that we are moving more and more towards branding, not just overall as a CMO job, but also in paid. And I think that we are just moving away from the, fill this form and I'll put you in my email campaign. I think that we're moving more and more closer to authentic storytelling that's really brand truth, that's what's going to make the difference. So as a CMO, you better find all those people who speak that truth. And be able to capture that. And I think that's where it's headed. I don't know if I'm right, but I do think that's the human part of a brand and that's what's going to make it or break it going forward.
Reid Carr: Well, I mean, I couldn't agree more on that. I mean, the human part of it is that one thing we continue to talk about is what the human in the loop or the humans that buy, and obviously, the emotional components of that. And I think we're seeing this technology solving in a lot of cases for everything else. I mean, I would always say that probably depends on the size of the organization you're in, what the skillsets you are. But you can say some people will hire for these skill sets. There's a lot of marketers out there that are kind of the single shingle kind of situation where they're like, "Boy, I got to learn all this stuff." And the way they're going to execute will probably be through AI that's good enough for the moment. Whereas when you're dealing at the upper echelons of marketing, I mean, you know who your other competitors are at that point and you're facing off as if it was the difference between a pee wee league and NFL. I mean it's at that point. So you really do need all the tools at that point.
And I think the one thing I've learned as the marketers that we deal with at the larger companies is so much of it is through the consumers that they're speaking to and really understanding them as well as the people who are on their team and managing and supporting them to be their best.
Katya Popova: Absolutely.
Reid Carr: And underneath all of that will be technology and tools and all of that. Strategy, as we always talk about, there's a lot of people that now you've got the note takers that'll take the note taking tools that will take that off so everyone can use their minds and dream the big dreams at that point. So execution at that point is certainly a challenge and that's going to be done through people.
Katya Popova: 100%. I think that one of my favorite parts of running a team has been working with them on creating a ... And I think that you'll relate to this because I know this is such a huge component of your organization. Creating a safe space to fail.
Reid Carr: Yeah.
Katya Popova: Obviously I'm not saying make the same typo five times. We're talking about have a hypothesis, test it out, fail. You will learn more by failing than anything else. And I think that that kind of environment is something that will be very critical for any CMO to institute. That's safety. For people to feel like they can experiment and try new things because that's the defining moment, I think, of what AI is bringing to us as professionals. There will be a lot to try and you won't get anywhere unless you're willing to fail along the way because you will fail along the way. And not threatening people with that is going to incentivize them to try and test things out.
Reid Carr: Well, it's interesting. I think academia is one of those worlds where I think that is kind of a big underpinning of the point of it. I mean-
Katya Popova: That's right that's right that's why it works with faculty.
Reid Carr: Exactly. I mean, they understand that. I mean, they're there and they're dealing with students day in and day out. They're doing their best and they're not meant to get everything perfect because that's why they're there.
Katya Popova: That's right. And which is, by the way, it was the aha moment for me as a professional working in academia. The moment I stopped trying to be the expert and telling them what to do and rather frame things as questions of I'm trying to answer. And this is my hypothesis. Let's see if it works. Sometimes I'm wrong. And by the way, there's no better giddier moment when I'm like, "Man, I was wrong about that. " I relish those moments because, wow, what an eye-opening moment. That was the crack that I got in terms of my philosophical engagement with my stakeholders was they understand hypotheses and testing. And the moment you frame it that way, whatever you have a crazy, stupid idea, which I have plenty of, when you frame it as a hypothesis that you're willing to test and have a plan of how to test it, even if you fail, it's a celebration that we've learned something important here.
Reid Carr: Well, and an important nuance I think too on having hypothesis is sometimes you're successful for a different reason than you had thought. There you go. And you have something to test against and go, well then good news is we were successful and better news is we also learned how to continue to evolve that because it was for a different reason than we originally thought because we questioned ourselves and went into it with that open mind. And so I think again, academia is such a fantastic place where that can happen and thrive. Absolutely. So I could talk about failing or experimenting things.
What is overhyped, and what are marketers still not paying enough attention to?
Reid Carr: What do you think out there is genuinely over hyped in this space, whether it's AI or marketing in general, and then maybe some stuff that most marketers aren't paying enough attention to. I mean, I think we talked about brand on one part. I mean, that's a big bucket, but maybe some other things that you think are kind of over or under hyped.Katya Popova: Something that broke my personal heart was I grew up thinking that polish and gloss is what sells because if you look professional and if you look like you're punching above your weight, that's the recipe for success. And we have absolutely graduated from, if you sniff marketing at this point, especially with the audience that I'm talking to, which is 17, 18, 19 year old people, they sniff marketing a mile away and run away. And that is so counterintuitive to me as a millennial. It's been drilled into me that it has to look incredibly polished. And don't get me wrong, there's a place for the polish, right? This is where a legitimate organization needs to have some polish, right?
But when it comes to what sticks as a message, polish is the least effective. I mean, we saw this, what, five, six years ago, which emails performed best, the marketing emails or the plain text emails. And we got a lot of data out of that, right? We know that plain-text emails often outperform a beautifully designed marketing email. Why? Because it feels genuine because if things that, oh, there's a human talking to me.
And take that and 10X it where we are right now, especially in the world that I market in, UGC, user generated content is the king. That is the only thing that we will be investing in for a very long time because it's the true testament of what the product is. Nobody believes the marketer's message, but everybody believes somebody who goes on TikTok and says, "This is what my dorm looks like. This is how I clean my dorm. This is what my roommate's like. This is what the dining hall is like." That's what students, potential students want to see. I cannot give them a glossy picture of the empty dining hall. That is not what sells the experience. And that has been a tough lesson for me just because of how I've been trained to think about it. But it's been refreshing because again, wrong. I've learned that this is just the wrong approach. And it's been so much fun to work with students to produce the kind of content that does well with their peers. That has been so much fun. And I think that every brand can learn from that. I mean, every beauty brand that you can think of starts on TikTok nowadays and that's where they thrive. It's not the glossy stuff, counterintuitively for a beauty product. It's the content creator trying on this lipstain and loving it. That's what sells the lip stain, nothing else. So I think these lessons have been tough, but very important. And lots of kudos to Gen Z for bringing us home on this.
Reid Carr: Yeah. It's interesting. We've been around since pre-social media as an agency, and I remember trying to convince clients to get into social media, whether at the time it was Twitter was probably the first foray into that in a big way after MySpace and whatnot. But I remember getting the questions like, what if people say something bad about our product? Or what if people talk about it? They were already saying it for one, but I think now we understand, I think we're just now answering that question that they had back then. And there are going to be problems. There are going to be these ... And how you respond to them, how you solve them, and because of that authenticity, that's actually what's going to create a better relationship with your brand.
Katya Popova: 100%. Lean into it with authenticity.
Reid Carr: Lean into it, and respond. Respond not just in a ... Because I think that was the other thing back then was like, oh, we need to respond in kind of air quotes in the sense that they would respond with a comment of, "I'm sorry you had a bad experience," whatever that may be. Now they want you to actually respond like, in the restaurant, clean the bathroom that there was a problem with, or respond differently when we ask this question and actually do something different. And the brands who did that are the ones who are here today.
Katya Popova: Because they're authentic.
Reid Carr: Yeah. Because they really wanted to deliver a good experience, a good product or something like that as opposed to just sell something.
Katya Popova: Absolutely. I'm always thinking about Ryan Ayer's TikTok account. It's such a masterclass on how to lean on a narrative. They love poking fun of themselves. And it's such a strange and bold way to take on as a brand that what a crazy idea that is. Let's show everybody how much we suck in some cases. But the humor ... I mean, it's not for everybody, don't get me wrong, but it's such an extreme example of leaning in on, you know who you are, that self-awareness, it's just like a human. If you are comfortable in your own skin, no matter what that is, but that comfort on its own is so attractive to other people. I think it's the same thing with brands. If you're comfortable in who you are, Ryan Ayer is very comfortable in who they are; it's attractive. It's like the flying moth to the light. You just love that, that comfort in your own skin.
Reid Carr: Well, it's back to being human and that human component of it.
Which AI tools are actually worth using right now?
Reid Carr: So a couple of the quick answer questions for you are, what's one AI tool you can't live without right now?Katya Popova: I was just talking about this because it changes so often. Can I give you three?
Reid Carr: Sure.
Katya Popova: Okay. So I've been really fanning over Claude because it's just so good. So I have Claude on every single app installed, and it's fantastic. Very close second is probably Notebook LM. That Google product is so good. Anytime I need to prepare for something, I just throw it in Notbook LM and I listen to on the way here, I listen to a few things just as a podcast style. And then the third one would probably be a toss between ClaudeCode and AI Studio by Google. My team has been building apps and I have zero developers on my team and they've built several functional apps that I've deployed to customers. That blows my mind. So I'm super excited about that. I'm so giddy about it. And again, none of us are developers. So these three are very critical for me, but I'm sure next time we talk it's going to be different.
Reid Carr: Well, and that's the expectation, right?
What skill or practice will matter most over the next 24 months?
Reid Carr: Because the other question I have for you is, what's one skill that marketers need to build in the next 24 months? That's two years. A lot changes in that period of time. So to set themselves up for success, what do they need to think through?Katya Popova: Is it a skill or is it a practice? So because I don't think that what I'm about to tell you is a skill per se, because I think we all have it, but to put it into practice all the time. And that's a clear definition of problems because AI is now making it so easy to solve a problem. The problem is we're not very clear on what we're solving for. And I think that the more clarity you have on and granularity you have on what you're solving for, you'll be unstoppable. But putting that into practice of weekly, daily of what am I trying to solve for this week, this month, that practice, I don't know if we have that in our habits. I think that's the one thing that I would focus on right now is dedicating time for yourself to think through, what problem am I solving? Because I do now have the tools to solve it.
Reid Carr: Yeah. Well, it's interesting. I mean, we always talk about that as most people come with thinking they have a particular problem in the form of a tactic...
Katya Popova: A website
Reid Carr: Exactly, that's kind of where we led this off as a website. That's exactly what I was going to say. Yeah. And then you realize what the problem was, or it surfaces other problems when you start to unpack that. And sometimes you get lucky, but most of the time you have to kind of go back and go, "Well, wait, what's the problem? Why do you think that's the solution to it? "
Katya Popova: Website is the perfect tool for that.
Reid Carr: Exactly.
Final Thoughts & Key Takeaways
Reid Carr: Well, this has been a rare look inside what it actually takes to build AI infrastructure inside a marketing organization, not just use the tools, but redesign the system. Katya, thank you for sharing what's working and what comes next. If today's conversation gave you something to think about, check out the show notes at www.redoor.biz/learn. Subscribe to The Marketing Remix wherever you get your podcasts and follow Red Door Interactive on LinkedIn for more. Thanks, Katya.Katya Popova: Thanks for having me.