Episode Description
Key Highlights:
- Agency Consolidation: Exploring the cultural and process challenges in the agency world.
- AI in Marketing: Discussing generative AI's role in creativity and productivity, not as a job replacer.
- Branding vs. Demand Generation: Balancing long-term brand equity with immediate sales goals.
- Brand Exposure: Its critical role in lead generation and the importance of engaging campaigns.
- Bluebeam's Innovation: A case study on time-saving and error-prevention in software marketing.
- AI's Future Role: Predicting significant transformational changes in business due to AI.
Summary:
In this episode, Genesis Capunitan, head of B2B at Initiative, shares insights from his extensive experience in media planning and brand marketing. He discusses the evolving landscape of the agency world, emphasizing the integration of creative and media strategies to meet client demands for efficiency and automation. Genesis highlights the importance of balancing brand and demand generation, illustrating this with a successful campaign for Bluebeam that focused on the transformative impact of their software on users' work-life balance. He underscores the significance of emotional messaging in B2B marketing and anticipates a transformative period ahead driven by AI and automation.
[Read the full transcript]
pharosIQ: So welcome to this week's episode of pharosIQ’s podcast, the podcast for B2B marketing professionals that is anything but boring. This week, really pumped. To have a different viewpoint coming in from the agency side of the world with over 20 years of experience in media planning, brand marketing, direct marketing Genesis is currently the head of B2B and was formerly the SVP and managing director over at Initiative.
pharosIQ: He oversees the T Mobile for business account efforts currently. He's also serving on the Initiative B2B advisory group, which services Customers like Salesforce, Amazon, Intuit, Sigma, and KPMG. Genesis has held senior positions at brand companies and agencies such as Bluebeam, Omnicom, and Interpublic Group across his pretty significant career.
pharosIQ: So welcome Genesis. How are you?
Genisis: Really good and glad to be here,
pharosIQ: actually. It's good to see you. Awesome. Before we jump in, tell us a little bit about Initiative and the work you're doing there.
Genisis: Yeah. Initiative is a part of a holding company. It's a media agency that is part of Interpublic Group, traded on the New York Stock Exchange as IPG.
Genisis: Initiatives been around for quite a few years. Our sister agency is Universal McCann. Initiative has clients like you had mentioned, but in addition to the B2B brands, Nike, Global, as well as Lego Constellation Brands which is a beverage CPG company that owns Modelo. So there's quite a few, just a small sample of all the global clients Initiative has.
Genisis: And I'm based in Los Angeles, but our global headquarters in New York City. So that is Initiative.
pharosIQ: Awesome. Yeah. Some really sweet brands. I would probably, I'd like to retire on the person who manages the Lego account. Personally, that's goals. They do a lot of awesome stuff. So
Genisis: you've
pharosIQ: been on the media agency side of things in demand for roughly 20 years, right?
pharosIQ: How have you seen the agency world changed since you first started out?
Genisis: It's I've worked on the client side, the brand side, as well as the agency side. And on the agency side, I've worked for media agencies, as well as digital agencies, as well as advertising agencies.
Genisis: So when it comes to marketing, advertising services, I've seen the full gamut from advertising to tech, obviously now media. It's changing a lot. And I think it's reflective of how business has been changing just generally, just. For the purpose of this conversation, I'll be general, but across many industries, they're going through a lot of transformations.
Genisis: They've gone through different phases of transformation. The biggest 1 was obviously when the beginning of my career, when the Internet early 2000s really just came to explode. And then the next generation of that was obviously mobile. As a 5g technology increase. But what I've seen a lot specifically in the agency world that I think maybe you're somebody listeners might take note of is, is there was a lot of separation between creative and media, especially when the holding companies started, investing and buying in these companies.
Genisis: So on top of that. The digital agencies like Razorfish, who I used to work with digital only critical mass, website design, those types of things were very separate. In the early 2000s, you saw a lot of digital separate media, separate, creative, separate fast forward to 2023. Media agencies are being, obviously media advertising and tech companies are being absorbed by large holding companies, but you'll see digital agencies completely go away, in terms of.
Genisis: They're just being integrated into an advertising agency, which I think it should be, but they were separated for the longest time. They were converging and media as well. The reason why media is integrating now with creative is really because of really the on the client side. There's a lot of particularly tech companies and tech and telecom companies that are finding it cumbersome to manage 15 different agencies in the area of media, sub media and creative.
Genisis: And it's just not tenable. In this day of a day and age where there's potential automation, and I know we'll be talking about AI maybe later. That's what is it's automation. The promises of automation basically can be achieved by. And I think a lot of agencies are responding where creative and media and tech have to come together to provide 1 solution.
Genisis: Across many different campaigns, but there's basically a very small number. A project managers that the clients will want to manage, to not take up their time. Speed agility is extremely important access to talent as well as automation. That's what clients want from agencies and that's what agencies are trying to basically deliver.
Genisis: Fast, some agencies are slower than others, but that is the direction.
pharosIQ: You think the consolidation has been good? Or still up for grabs?
Genisis: Still up for grabs. I think consolidation is difficult when you have different parties that have been independent and separate for a long time. So there's a lot of You know, obviously challenges regarding just culture integration, but even practical process integration, this is where this is how creative is developed.
Genisis: And this is how media will bring it to life. And this is how technology will create an interactive component to it with a lot of great measurement. That sounds easy when I say it, but when all these. Desperate teams, either within the same holding company or not when they try to do that together. It's it's difficult.
Genisis: Needless to say, and a lot of it has to do with culture processes, personality, and also even accountability, different agencies have different types of accountability. Unless that's really directed and even out by the client, there's going to be a lot of headbutts, if you will. And that's really common actually, rather than a seamless integration at this point,
pharosIQ: almost like sales and marketing alignment.
Genisis: Exactly. Exactly.
pharosIQ: He's going towards the same. Everybody's swimming down the same, but everybody wants to get there in a different space. And it's usually just, and it's usually correlated to KPIs, right? Everybody runs towards KPIs. And if the KPIs aren't aligned. Across all segments of it, then you have your silos and your battles and your channels, so you mentioned it, but obviously generative is creating a lot of questions across revenue team sales and marketing teams, et cetera.
pharosIQ: You'll. What's your vibe for how, what type of impact it will have on the agency world, just specifically given its ability to create, content by a prompt versus, some of that creative work be replaced. Those are my questions in my head. How do you see it?
Genisis: It's interesting because if we just take a step back for a second and just look at AI and the history of AI, just 5 or 6 years ago. The main bulk of AI work was a lot of facial recognition that you would say on Facebook, even things that you use on Waze, directional type of kind of assistance.
Genisis: That's AI as well. Natural language generation, natural language processing, that was the advent, really a precursor to what they call now generative AI. So we've seen an evolution, from AI being used in commercial applications for quite some time, but now With this new term, generative AI, there's a lot of there's a lot of what's the word?
Genisis: Maybe it's a branding issue because when people, I think, from my standpoint, when they talk about generative AI, sometimes I think they're talking about discriminative AI. And sometimes when people talk about discriminative AI, they're actually referring to generative AI. Discriminative AI basically is, a lot of your listeners probably know is more machine learning.
Genisis: So that, so producing a statistical analysis of prices versus demand based on 1, 200 Excel documents that, an insurance company has basically, and it spits out a forecast or natural language summary, basically of, of the data, so that's more discriminative AI, the output is forecasting, basically it's analysis, those types of things.
Genisis: Generative AI is basically, as you, which has taken the, cake, in terms of attention, which at GPT, I don't know. Is producing an image producing basically a sense, a copy it's obviously in the chat GPT world. It's a chat bot. So yeah, so how I think it's affecting, agencies as well as brands.
Genisis: I think it's interesting. One is. I've come to learn that a lot of agencies love using chat, but the problem is actually the prompts. There's even new jobs if anyone listeners out there are interested in, if you just type in prompt engineer, you'll get. 100, 000 job listings at between 85 and 180, 000 a year.
Genisis: So people, so prompt engineer is a new role that's surfacing. Now, when agencies use chat GPT, getting the key thing for them is getting the right output and getting the right output is actually asking the right query, the right questions, which you might seem as easy but it's not if you're basically looking for tonality, you're looking for style, write me a write me a jingle for a carpet company in the prose of Shakespeare, right?
Genisis: So that you can do that. So really, depending on so the output. And the quality of the output is highly dependent on your prompts and your query. So what I'm seeing a lot is people developing sub applications for AI to create the prompts to be used for things like chat, GBT, that's a huge thing. Now right now on the agency side.
Genisis: It's a little bit of a novelty, in terms of creating content or creating copy for an ad specific. It's a bit of a novelty. It's not more enterprise wide. However, I'm seeing AI, generative AI, chat GPT or Bard, for instance, Google Bard to be used to develop concepts. If there's looking at, high level concepts, the Big level ideas type stuff that would be attributable or impact specific audiences like, doctors or construction workers or business decision makers, high level concept ideas.
Genisis: I'm seeing a lot of course, with the right prompt, but I'm seeing a lot of usage in that way and I still see usage and actually creating copies specifically for titles and headlines for emails as well as ad copy. But Right now there's not a burning kind of fear that is taking over anyone's job.
Genisis: And I think the agencies, as well as even the creative people that I work with. See this as a tool. It's basically they're no longer using a typewriter. They're using Microsoft Word. They're using a word processor that didn't replace their job, obviously, but I think their perspective is this is a tool.
Genisis: This could basically make me focus or help me focus on higher. Value tasks, why maybe mundane or procedural tasks can be taken care of by a I. So it makes them in fact, more productive and potentially even more job security as well by having these tools. So their perspective on it just generally is different than I think how the press reads about.
Genisis: It's going to eliminate all human beings, their jobs and things. Yeah,
pharosIQ: I find it like for me and in the creative parts of my role and just in some cases it just it serves as a almost a starting point, right? We all have those moments where you know, you have to do something creative. You have to write something, you have to speak somewhere you have to, step up in front of a group, all of that.
pharosIQ: And you have that moment where you're staring at the blinking, the blinking screen on the mic on the document where you're just like you're. Completely stuck on where to start. So I've been leveraging it for just give me a five things that a B2B marketer in 2023 needs to is thinking about.
pharosIQ: And then I'd be like, okay, like just to get my brain flowing. And then I found That those initial prompts are like, okay, cool. Now I'm running with something and then it becomes my own from there. So that's where that's my application, and and something in some cases, just like I've used it you ever had that where you don't know how to finish an email, right?
pharosIQ: Yeah. You don't know how to finish something like, what's what's the best close here. Like those, so simple applications have been my favorites. I agree. I think it's a really exciting time to, to It's really exciting time to just, like leverage those tools. And I think we're quite a bit of time away from job replacement, which is, that obviously, most of most media is driven by negative narratives, right?
pharosIQ: Because that's what drives clicks. That's what drives engagement. That's what drives all of that. It's fun to, it's really been interesting.
Genisis: Yeah. And once everyone has AI at some point then there's really no advantage at that point. Everyone has the same. Remember, many years ago when there was a transition over to, let's say Microsoft word, in, in Microsoft office.
Genisis: There was a few companies that adopted it slower than others, but now everyone uses it, so it's not an advantage to have basically a Microsoft office suite because everyone, it's ubiquitous now at this point, I think AI is going to follow that same path, at some point and from generative AI to, to finish off that point it's still good for things like use case, you had mentioned about finishing off an email or, 10 ad copy lines that you're, you're Developing, but when you launch a 10, 000 email campaign for for, in a CRM platform, like par dot, for instance, an automation thing from Salesforce.
Genisis: And, 20 percent of those emails go to new prospects, 10 percent goes to current customers. It's for retention. 30 percent of it goes to a lead nurture program, right? When you start and there's subdivisions. And if you do a B, testing against that as well there's an A, B, testing 3 or 4, A, B, testing against kind of current customers for retention engagement, or even a win back email campaign, right?
Genisis: When you get to those numbers. Jenner VI becomes less easier to use, obviously, when it comes to, mass enterprise usage, currently, but I think there's some companies out there that most likely will tackle that in the future. But anyway.
pharosIQ: Speaking of the mass application we all know brand is a pretty key element in marketing strategy and driving long term demand.
pharosIQ: But in the B2B space where you specialize that initiative, it's often hard to showcase that ROI for executives who can't make that connection between brand and demand over the long term. How can marketers do that now and in the future?
Genisis: Yeah, it's a, it's a perennial question debate.
Genisis: I should say, actually, about how much to invest against demand and brand. I think LinkedIn, I think they recommend 60 percent brand, 40 percent demand gen slash lead generation as a part of demand gen. That's a guideline. A lot of companies have, I know, certainly Mike, the companies that I work with on the B2B space.
Genisis: Within the IPG initiative world, the splits are all different, that type of thing. But the debate remains, how much and how little should we invest in brand or demand gen? I think that it all, a lot of it has to depend on, honestly, how strong your brand is. So there are some companies like Salesforce and Amazon, Intuit, for instance, which is, TurboTax is one of their products.
Genisis: They have strong brands, they built them over the, over the years. But even then you still find, those companies investing in brand because you see the value in it, right? And it depends on how strong your brand equity is. I always measure brand equity as if I'll go into a grocery store and they don't have Heinz ketchup, I will walk out of the store and go to another store to get Heinz ketchup.
Genisis: I'm not going to get Del Monte. I'm not going to get, so that's a brand equity. I will walk out of the store and go to another store and basically get, Cause that's my favorite ketchup, right? So that's obviously brand equity. You see a lot of brand equity in the B2B space. Some people obviously are hardcore Mac fans.
Genisis: They would never touch a PC. Some people are huge AWS fans as well. They wouldn't use another cloud solution. So it really depends on how strong your brand is. But and on the demand gen side demand gen has. Less to do, I think, with marketing, which again, it has something to do with marketing. I don't want a bunch of people yelling at me.
Genisis: It has less to do with marketing, but more about sales. And you said earlier, there's always a, there's always a debate between, marketing and sales, going back and forth and I could share, my quick thought on that, but. People characterize this as a brand and demand gen debate.
Genisis: And in fact, it's, I don't think it's much of a debate. I think people understand that building a brand over a long period of time actually helps. Stronger brand equity, which I mentioned earlier, provides a larger deal sizes, shorter sales cycles. They stay around longer. Stronger brands like Nike, I know it's a consumer example, but they can raise their prices, whereas a no name brand has to stay low in order for them to get any market share.
Genisis: So if you can control prices in your particular segment, that's the fastest way to profitability. You just increase the price. There's no marketing spend. There's no product innovation kind of additional spend. You just raise the price. And you get closer to profitability or over profitability for that matter.
Genisis: So that's what I think, but in terms of demand, so that's what brand does for dimension. The issue with sales and the dark, dirty truth is that, so when I worked on the client side we would work hard with our marketing plans or media plans to develop the best leads. We throw over the leads to the sales team.
Genisis: Says, great, we tried these leads out but they don't work. Can you do something better and send us a new batch of leads? But I'm finding that when I look at and investigate the situation. I think a lot of salespeople, especially if they get a lot of leads, 500 to 800 leads a month, let's say for marketing, they'll check the top five, maybe 10%, and if they don't convert, they just throw the whole thing away, basically, which, and then they just say, Hey, marketing, you guys need to target better, you need to provide quality traffic, quality leads to me.
Genisis: The shame about that, unfortunately, I think it's very common because I'm seeing that I'm not going to name companies, but I'm seeing that across the board. Not even when I was on the client side. But the shame about that is that. When sales do follow up specifically with with these leads thoroughly.
Genisis: And they get the nose and they get, reasons to the no, and even some yeses. It would be terrific to have that information be given to the marketing team and the media team. So to give guidance on what's basically working or not working, right? That feedback loop doesn't exist. If a lot of sales team basically don't, they don't do the thorough vetting.
Genisis: And then so there's a blame that stale says, Hey, the leads aren't converting. So you guys are doing something wrong in marketing and marketing. Get us some other leads. And then marketing blame sales saying, following up with all the leads and giving me feedback that I need to basically improve my campaigns.
Genisis: It is a circular issue. Anyway, I hope I provided them. It's been
pharosIQ: around, it's been battling around in my head for about 17 years. Yeah. But which is interesting. Your point is interesting, right? Should demand Jen, right? Paid demand Jen be a function of sales and not marketing. Because obviously if the leader of the selling organization is on the hook for the paid demand gen budget, I'm pretty sure that person is going to be pretty damn well sure that they're going to follow up with those leads because they have up to that versus pointing over to another group and saying, these leads aren't great, your fault marketing and passing the buck, right?
pharosIQ: Which I think was to be candid, the original vision for the CRO role, right? But what was, Okay. The CRO role just became a fancy title for VP of sales.
Genisis: Yeah. Yeah. In fact, CRO should oversee both marketing and sales. Yes,
pharosIQ: a fraction of the companies where they have a CRO. I can't tell you companies have a CRO and a CMO.
pharosIQ: Those are competing concepts, right? Unless the CMO reports to the CRO and that's a lot of C's to report into. So that's why I've always, I think that the whole purpose of the CRO role was to have a single layer of accountability over that go to market process. When one person's on the hook for the whole go to market, like they're on, if the leads that they're paying to be generated are being pushed back by sales, they're not just stuck on saying, Oh, it's their fault or their fault.
pharosIQ: It's they own it. So I think like the path to true go to market success is a singular leader to handle the revenue team. And to your point, I think future looking forward. You're going to see organizations will have a marketing organization that is very much brand PR, et cetera, right?
pharosIQ: Like creative, if you will, social PR, creative, building that, and then you're going to have a go to market organization that handles really like demand to close, right? That quote, that whole full function, including some of the paid media, including SEO, which means, if you're a sales leader right now, you should be getting yourself on SEO and PPC and et cetera, right?
pharosIQ: If you're a marketing leader. You should be jumping into sales, sales methodology and follow up best practice and all of the different challenges, all of that. Cause I think that's the future. Like having a single go to market leader that handles both that demand, the demand side of the house all the way to the close.
pharosIQ: Cause I think that's where you'll see most success.
Genisis: Yeah, and I'm trying to because I don't know if, or when, that transition would happen, but I'm a big fan of having sales have a strong voice in the dimension programs. At least if they don't own the program with the dimension program.
Genisis: Then I want them to at least have a solid voice about what they're looking for, the audiences they're targeting and what's converting, what's not converting because you want to take what's converting, create a lookalike audience against that and basically blow it out as much as you can. But at the same time with marketing and branding.
Genisis: I wouldn't basically diminish the importance of that. I think salespeople as well as SDRs and frontline sales need to understand that someone's twice as likely to fill out a lead gen form or sign up for a webinar or sign up for an event or sign up for a free trial or sign up for a phone appointment with frontline salesperson if they have been exposed somehow to the brand.
Genisis: The air coverage of display ads or linear broadcast or digital social, social, display, whatever twice as likely for someone to basically click on a response is some sort of call to action from a company that actually had a brand impression that was exposed, that was presented to a prospect.
Genisis: That sales and demand gen could capture later on the road. So that's what they also have to understand as well. I think there's mutual understanding about the importance of both groups. So
pharosIQ: my favorite, two favorite metrics there that I think helps has helped me quantify to executive peers and previous bosses, et cetera, is organic traffic to your site.
pharosIQ: Volume of organic searches, right? If how if each month you're seeing a steady uptick of people typing into their search initiative versus to be marketing agency, right? That's where you can start measuring your brand impact. Everybody says that all the time. How do I measure brand?
pharosIQ: That's a key. That's one right there. Or how many people are coming to your site from those organic searches and those
Genisis: Yeah, throughout my career, I measure a few things. And so I measure obviously the performance of paid search as well. And a little slide kind of note side note is Google search, obviously a powerful and paid search for Google is powerful.
Genisis: What we found a lot of success in is Microsoft being sometimes overlooked about the fact that it's the second most powerful search engine, but that's still millions of people, right? It's and also you can really negotiate better rates. But anyway, I digress. Formats of paid search also is important to know during a period of time to help measure brand.
Genisis: Organic search, of course, as well as traffic to your website, but more particularly actually net new user traffic, meaning people who've never been to your website before are now visiting measuring that week over week. So that's extremely important. So search volume Paid search statistics as well as obviously net new user traffic to the website and the fourth that we do that's a little bit not necessarily in real time, but at least it gives you the measure of brand attraction, if you will, a brand performance is unaided and aided awareness that many different companies.
Genisis: Do a survey based research, whether it be you go up or whether it be comp score or Nielsen, we do that every quarter to measure basically unaided and aided awareness. Unaided awareness actually is when during the survey that people have been exposed to your brand before, but know what it is and what it stands for when you see changes in that for those statistically significant audience, then we also, have a good idea of creative and creative placements actually doing its job. So I would say those four key things are the key things that we look at.
pharosIQ: Interesting point you made up being as well, too, a lot of, especially in the B2B space, a lot of company B2B buyers. Their companies use the office three 65 suite.
pharosIQ: The standard search engine locked down with SSO is edge, right? And, and if you're on edge, the standard search is going to come out of bank. So from a B2B perspective, it is a really solid tool on that point, a really solid point.
Genisis: It is 90. Yeah. 90 percent of companies use office. Yeah, so that's, I'm glad you said that cause that's the secret sauce.
Genisis: The fact that they have competitive pricing, but the fact that they have a For a B2B audience for a B2B audience working either at home or in the office has the office suite included in their package. It's a natural, some people switch to Chrome, like intentionally, but majority of people, when they basically click a link from their email, for instance, Or from a PowerPoint presentation or word, it opens up edge.
Genisis: So anyway, but so there, there's the paid search opportunity as well. So hopefully that's a little tidbit for your listeners.
pharosIQ: It's a big win. So let's talk campaigns. You've done a lot of them, right? Client side, that's the, so I'm sure our user, our listeners are really pumped to hear about your most creative, non boring campaign, right?
pharosIQ: We know, why'd you love it? And did it work?
Genisis: So yeah, I will give an example from a company that I was the global demand gen director of demand gen called blue beam. It's blue beam, exactly how it's spelled, bluebeam. com. It basically builds on Adobe technology. Adobe is a partner. And it really focuses on the AEC industry, which stands for architecture, engineering, construction.
Genisis: It's one of the top three biggest industries in the world. Second to probably a financial services and healthcare. So Bluebeam is a software global software suite that came out a few years ago. I came on board because it needed to revamp a little bit of its branding, as well as his approach to demand gen.
Genisis: So as a, as a global director, I looked at what was basically the competitors and what existed. So a lot of competitors, which is not too dissimilar to a lot of B2B tech companies now, but but the competitors, other software companies in the construction space, engineering space had a very similar tone.
Genisis: These, Very functional message. We have the fastest software's we provide the best optimization. It's always that type of terminology. And and it got to a point where I don't know if they all just copied each other, or it was a safe play, or they were catering to a CMO that basically didn't want to take chances.
Genisis: So I went through a process of, really just doing a lot of focus groups. And I found out in the focus groups, one of the value basically that people saw using Bluebeam was time and time saving. So it, just a quick background in the construction world, they're called drawing sets, but you guys probably refer to them as blueprints, right?
Genisis: Blueprints have to be modified on paper, or they were traditionally modified on paper by. Mechanical engineers and civil engineers and architects and engineers as well as, interior designers versions of these blueprints and how they mark them up, just pages and pages in time, to do 1 floor.
Genisis: Of about 5000 square feet office floor, the amount of paper and time it would take about 5 or 6 months to measure all the markups and changes before construction started. Really? Or when construction 1st started. When Bluebeam came out, they digitize the whole thing. A 6 month kind of process of all the markups is called a markup stage.
Genisis: Could actually be done in 3 days. So it's a huge thing. So people can go home at night. And this is the feedback I got from the user groups. People could be at dinner by five o'clock. People don't have to work on the weekends. They wouldn't have to carry papers and papers. You probably see pictures of architects with rolled paper underneath their arm.
Genisis: That was the classic image, right? And rightfully because of all the different markups and that they had to manage, right? Bluebeam provided that it. Software suite that digitize the whole thing that different various groups and all over the world can go in there and make changes quickly and they can track the changes.
Genisis: They can, they don't have to communicate through phone about what was changed or not. Nothing like that. The focus groups basically said it provides. Less, what it is blooping provides it mitigates risk. It actually saves time. And basically prevents errors and I said, okay, great.
Genisis: Those are functional things, but what does it do for you? And so they said we can get home at night. We can be home by 5, we can have dinner, we can play with our kids. We'd have a life. And so then I realized when we started doing the focus group, the research that. We created a campaign called the clarity campaign, which I wrote the copy for.
Genisis: The enemy is confusion. The savior is clarity. So what we did was we didn't go out to the market and say, this is what Bluebeam is. And this is what the technology is and the functional benefits. But instead, what we did was we tried to project an image or a vision to a prospective customer of what.
Genisis: Their company could look like by using our technology, how their lives can change. In a sense, we weren't basically selling them just. If you look at a horseback riding example, we're not selling in the saddle. We're selling them the whole lifestyle of basically horseback riding, being part of a ranch and being part of club and buying the clothes and doing the social things and jumping events.
Genisis: We were selling the vision of the lifestyle. So what Bluebeam did was through the clarity campaign was. We're we can tell you left and right all day long with the functional benefits of this is, but we're going to stand out and make ourselves defensible and unique. By saying, this is the type of company, you can transform.
Genisis: Yourself to be if you use this software and what that looks like is. There's less errors, less risk, less lawsuits. Less confusion. Your employees are happy. They could be home by five o'clock. We just cast the division, if you will.
pharosIQ: I'm not working on weekends. They're cold. Yeah. All that stuff.
pharosIQ: And then
Genisis: the division,
pharosIQ: and
Genisis: It
pharosIQ: was a
Genisis: hit.
pharosIQ: It's still happening right now. Like still happening. And that's the purpose of the podcast. It's called B to boring because a lot of B2B marketing is still boring and my space at MRP and there are at least. Four or five B2B demand or intent vendors who use the word precision.
Genisis: Oh, and optimization that's used a lot too.
pharosIQ: Precision. It's precision. It's okay, we get it. Straight lines, precision. Great. Everybody's website looks the same. Everybody's, so again, for me I absolutely, and it's baffling that you're, we're still talking, we're having the same conversation.
pharosIQ: Just talking about, I've said this to my team many times, right? No one wants to know what we do. Everybody wants to know what's in it for them.
Genisis: Yeah.
pharosIQ: In every type of marketing, everybody's what's in it for me? If you can't answer that with the message you're putting out in front of them, sales or marketing, you failed.
pharosIQ: Because it's in a race, because then you're just feature racing, right? Who has the most features? And then it comes down to who has the most funding, who has the bigger dev team, who can crank out features faster, until there's no more features. And then the renewal stop and the industry pops off the table because so then guess where we're at now in 2023 is that right?
pharosIQ: Yeah. The funding slows, the features slow and the sellers and marketers are like what do I do? I can't talk about them.
Genisis: But there's a lot of research from Deloitte, Gartner, LinkedIn, B2B Institute. They're saying like, look, creating an emotive. Message to stand out because these people are still human beings will make a difference in your brand and make a difference ultimately in your sales and demand chat.
Genisis: That message is now being called out to the rooftops, I think, by so many different companies. I'm hoping a lot of B2B CMOs and things are basically taking that to heart. But, yeah.
pharosIQ: Awesome. Cool. That's amazing. A really killer example, just because it's something we're still going through. Which is, so if there's 1 marketer who listens today, who says, wow, I'm still, why am I, why do I look like everyone else? Why are we still doing? Boring stuff, right?
Genisis: And with Bluebeam, the great thing about that particular campaign was we backed it up. It was like, we can change your life, and obviously your work life affects your personal life.
Genisis: And sometimes your personal life affects your work life. It's life, right? At the end of the day. We basically backed up that campaign with here's a full suite software suite for you for 30 days free trial, if you don't believe us do a free, 30 day free trial. And we played with 14 day, nine day 30 day free trial.
Genisis: We actually found out that actually oddly enough, the free trial numbers that were the lowest actually performed the best because we find out, we found out through surveys is, Is since they know it's only going to be for 7 day free trial, for instance, they only use the crap out of that free trial for that 7 days or 6 days that they have it.
Genisis: If you give them 30 days or longer, then they'll just get to it later, but never really engage with the software and then convert to a paid version. But. Anyway, all that to say is the clarity campaign worked out really well.
pharosIQ: Genesis, thanks so much. This was great, right? Tons of insight.
pharosIQ: We covered AI, we covered brand, we covered demand, we covered, all of that. And I think, we really appreciate the time you spent. Any closing thoughts?
Genisis: I think I think with AI transformation, I think with a brand, clients that are basically wanting agencies to break down their walls and work collectively with each other and partners and things like that.
Genisis: The accelerant is going to be AI automation and speed and agility is the need and the desire that a lot of clients are asking for and companies actually are asking for. I think these next three years are going to be a transformational period. As was the. com boom back, like in the, what the late nineties that memory, everybody basically put a.
Genisis: com at the end of their name, their company name, underwear. com or, flashlight or flashlight, it's going to be a lot of that that type of disruption, positive disruption. So yeah, just hold on to your hats, your seats for the next three years.
pharosIQ: Thank you so much for joining us for listening.
pharosIQ: Make sure to if you enjoy like what you hear, go to Spotify or whatever platform that you listen on, give us a solid rating ratings always help get us out there. Share with your friends, share on social. You can find me on LinkedIn. You can find MRP on LinkedIn as well.
pharosIQ: As far as a couple of the social channels, Genesis, where can we find you?
Genisis: Yeah, Genesis Capunitan, C A P U N I T A N at LinkedIn.
pharosIQ: Awesome. Cool. Thank you so much for joining. It's been really a pleasure and we'll catch up again soon. All right.
Genisis: Thank you very much. Thank you, Bye.
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