Another great interview!
Today, we are talking to the incredible Savannah Westbrock!
About Savannah: Savannah Westbrock is an innovation leader with a decade of experience in digital media. She’s adapted her programmatic marketing background into product-marketing centric roles across both agency networks and AdTech companies, currently serving as the VP of Commercial Growth for Inuvo’s IntentKey AI solution. Her approach is straightforward: find the opportunity others haven’t seen yet, build something that works, and make sure the industry knows it. She’s a recognized voice in AdTech, named a Top Woman in Media & Ad Tech by AdExchanger, and is passionate about bringing clarity to spaces that move too fast for most to keep up with.
Contact Savannah: https://www.linkedin.com/in/savannahwb/
Also, keep up with Savannah on LinkedIn to see when she posts the extended version of her speech from the AMA conference!
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
The goal of The Marketing Gateway is simple – we want to build a connection between all of our marketing mentors in the Midwest and learn from one another! And the best way to learn is to listen.
And the next best way is to share!
For more episodes: https://www.themarketinggateway.com
Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.
TRANSCRIPT:
Sean Jordan (00:00)
Well, hey everyone, it’s Sean in St. Louis. Welcome back to the Marketing Gateway. And I have with me today Savannah Westbrock. And Savannah and I have tried and tried to get this recorded, and we’ve been through ups and downs. So I’m so happy we get to finally do this, Savannah.
Savannah Westbrock (00:12)
We’re here, we did it.
Sean Jordan (00:14)
Well, welcome and so glad to have you on. And one of the reasons I really wanted to have you on the show is because I heard you speak earlier this year at the AMA conference, and you were just so great in what you had to share. You were part of that initial presentation.
And it was it was wonderful. So thank you for doing that and so glad to have you on today.
Savannah Westbrock (00:32)
Yeah, I’m excited to chat, Sean. We’ve had a lot of really nice back and forth. I’m excited to really get into it today.
Sean Jordan (00:39)
Well, you know, I always ask guests to tell me something surprising that I don’t know. It could be anything you’d like to share, so go for it.
Savannah Westbrock (00:46)
Well, this is our our first time formally sitting down. This is a St. Louis themed podcast, Sean. So why don’t I teach you a St. Louis specific way to say hello? Yeah.
Sean Jordan (00:55)
I love that. Let’s do it.
Savannah Westbrock (00:57)
So, you probably know in French you say bonjour, so good day to say hello, but in the St. Louis French dialect, they say bonjour, which is beautiful day.
Which I always think is so nice. I like to share that with people because St. Louis gets a little bit of a bad rep for our kind of Missouri French, our our Hick French that people call it. But a lot of people don’t realize we do have our own dialect that was spoken here for hundreds of years that really developed mostly from the influence of Canadians who were in the process of migrating from Quebec and Ontario down to New Orleans. And a lot of them stopped and made a home here.
That’s a big part of the reason we talk the way we do.
Sean Jordan (01:43)
Well, you’re you’re giving me some assurance here that we are not just completely brain dead when we say things like showdo or des Bolivar or you know,
Savannah Westbrock (01:50)
Yeah.
Sean Jordan (01:51)
some of those other corruptions of French that we use for locations around town. So
Savannah Westbrock (01:56)
Yeah,
there’s a little bit of logic to it. It’s not just us making stuff up.
Sean Jordan (02:02)
Well that’s great. I I am from Illinois and you know, in Illinois, we have a lot of towns that have weird pronunciations and you know, like Monticello, Illinois. anywhere else it’d be Monticello, hey, it’s Monticello in Illinois. So we’re kinda used to mispronouncing things where I’m from, so
Savannah Westbrock (02:19)
That one can’t explain. I’ve I’ve only dug into the French.
Sean Jordan (02:23)
Well great. Well, you know, in this series, on the marketing gateway, we’re focused on the Saint Louis area. Tell me a little bit about how you came to live and work in the Saint Louis area.
Savannah Westbrock (02:33)
So I came here for work, like a lot of people. So the marketing community really opened their arms and welcomed me in. So I came via the Missouri Journalism School where I studied advertising, strategic communication. And while I was there, we were in this moment where a lot of publishers were struggling to keep their online content monetized. So we began to see the rise of programmatic advertising and social media and biddable media in general.
So I started really at the cusp of programmatic advertising and this idea that we can start to more broadly bid on media online and just set our desired audiences and our desired content and find that marriage. And that brought me to St. Louis ultimately, where I was able to start my career because we do have this really strong agency background here. We have a big tech community here. And ultimately I began
Shifting gears from hands-on keyboard work in that area into ad tech and innovation more broadly.
Sean Jordan (03:39)
That’s fantastic. And so glad to have all that expertise here in St. Louis along with you. So well, fantastic. Well, I know you know, one of the things that we are always thinking about in the world of marketing is innovation. And, you know, we we we love to talk about it. We love to think about all of the ways that technology is pushing us forward, but we also get it wrong some of the times, right? So what do you think that marketers really get wrong about that word when innovation?
Savannah Westbrock (04:08)
Yeah, well, it is one of those words that everybody walks around with a different definition in their heads. And I do think mine is more different than most people’s. because I think innovation does tend to just mean something new to most people, and marketers especially tend to only look at innovation through that lens of additive innovation. Like, what is this new thing that I can tack on? What’s my big idea? What’s my new channel?
And when you look at innovation in that manner, you really are limiting yourself. And I think a lot of people feel that pressure, whether it’s from their clients or their agencies or their own selves and just trying to be ambitious, they’re looking for that easy button and they think, okay, well if I can just grab onto something new and tack it onto my existing plan, that’ll get me to the next quarter, that’ll get me to the next year, that’ll get this budget approved.
But marketing is always challenging us to to do more with less. And that’s where if you really dive into the practice of innovation, you learn about subtractive innovation, you learn about incremental innovation.
And those are two areas where marketers can really benefit. So subtractive innovation really does challenge you to say, okay, what can I remove to see a better output? So where can I just clarify my focus? Where am I maybe dividing my resources and spreading myself out too thin? so I feel like we see that all the time in things like our budgets. Like, am I in too many channels? Did I produce so much creative that no singular piece is getting to shine?
And product people I think do see this quite a bit as well, with like, okay, we’re being pressured to build feature after feature after feature, and nothing is as good as it would be if we really got to focus on the one thing that we were truly passionate about and really confident would see the best result. And then incremental innovation is my favorite, but it is the most difficult because I think that’s the work that challenges you the most.
It really asks you, like, where am I getting in my own way? Like, where are my processes or lack thereof more often prohibiting me from truly doing my best work? Like, where do we need to kind of go back to the drawing board and have those difficult conversations about what is going wrong? Like what is blocking us from making true progress?
Sean Jordan (06:38)
You know, it’s it’s so interesting. I love the the way you have kind of distilled that down into some di different types of innovation. so I do a lot of consumer research, and years ago we were testing some creative concepts and the word innovation was in there, and people really liked it. They really responded to it, and we just on a whim started asking them, well, what does that word mean to you? And it was so bizarre, they could not define it. They could not explain it, they just knew they liked it.
And so I I think being able to put it into boxes and to kind of say, well, these are some different ways in which you can be innovative is so much easier than trying to define it itself.
Savannah Westbrock (07:16)
I see it with the word innovation. I see it with the word strategy. Like you and I have talked about that before. Like there is a
Sean Jordan (07:20)
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Savannah Westbrock (07:23)
difference between strategy and just a list of tactics that you’re taking. You also see it with other abstract concepts, right? Like leadership, AI. Like what do these words actually mean? If you pause and break down that vocab and how you’re defining it, usually if you get everybody on the same page, it’s a lot easier to make more of that plan.
And you can go forward from there.
Sean Jordan (07:48)
E even the word brand means so many different things to different people.
Savannah Westbrock (07:50)
Yeah.
Sean Jordan (07:52)
And I always say it’s like a cloud, like you can see it from far away and know what it is, but you get up in it and you have no idea what’s going on. Well, you know, you mentioned programmatic marketing earlier. And of course, I know what that is, but I’m gonna guess there are people in our audience that don’t, ’cause we have all kinds of listeners that do all kinds of different marketing. So why don’t you give us a quick rundown? What is programmatic marketing?
Savannah Westbrock (08:13)
Well, speaking of words that mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, you will really commonly hear programmatic used interchangeably with display banners, because that was the bread and butter for a long time. but programmatic is really referring to any type of digital media that’s bought in an auction that is not the social media, these search campaigns, those sort of walled gardens. It’s everything on the open web.
So your CTV belongs in here, your digital audio belongs in here. It’s really everything else on that open internet is bought programmatically.
Sean Jordan (08:50)
Okay. And I know one of the big topics of discussion right now in programmatic marketing is how the AI landscape is changing things. So tell me a little bit about that, because I know that’s an area where you have a lot of expertise.
Savannah Westbrock (09:02)
Yeah, well we’re really having two conversations at once because you’re seeing how the past few years of generative AI especially has really affected
the rest of biddable media, so your social media and those paid campaigns and your search, everything that Meta and Google is doing, everything that retail media networks and other walled gardens are doing has really been affected by AI. So there was a big question of okay, well what does programmatic do? Like what about the rest of the internet? Where do we go from here?
And I think a big response a lot of people have had is in our measurement strategies. So for a long time, programmatic was really dependent on just audience data. And you sort of sold programmatic as: well, we’re the ones who are gonna find your audience across the open web, wherever they are. Like it doesn’t matter what they’re looking at on the internet, we’re gonna define that audience using really tight data strategies. And we’re gonna find them, and we’re the ones who are gonna drive those clicks.
Those conversions. And I do think that that formula has switched a little bit because the quality of the data that something like Amazon can give is a little bit fresher, it’s a little bit cleaner. So programmatic really now is functioning more as an awareness driver. Like we’re the ones who can find those net new audiences because.
Retail media networks are fantastic. Like search and social is definitely not going anywhere, but they do have really finite audiences. So it’s a pretty common story you’ll see in digital media environments where you’ll run a campaign for three months or six months, and you’ll start to see your results plateau because you’ve been hitting that same audience over and over again.
So you can refresh your creative, but really it’s not going to change the fact that you’re not finding new audiences, you’re not finding new people. The only way you can really do that is through your programmatic strategy and making sure it’s complementary to the rest of your marketing efforts. So that’s that’s one
Sean Jordan (11:06)
When I
Savannah Westbrock (11:07)
conversation.
Sean Jordan (11:08)
yeah. I I want to ask you about retail media networks, Ramon. I’ve talked about them before on the show, but for those that aren’t familiar with the topic, by the way, retail media networks are owned by retailers. So like Amazon owns one, Lowe’s owns one, I think Home Depot has one, Target has one, Kroger has a huge one. and
Savannah Westbrock (11:23)
Yep. Everyone.
Sean Jordan (11:26)
yeah, and and they’re all basically selling access to their customers both digitally and sometimes physically as well, through through different
physical ways of interacting with them. So this is something that has been kind of on the rise the last few years. How is that impacting your strategy as you’re thinking about those? Cause they they do have a lot of control over what you’re able to to put through those networks, right? But how is it helping you in terms of thinking about reaching out to consumers?
Savannah Westbrock (11:53)
Well, I do think the quality not only of that data and that inventory is really relevant. It’s something we have to put in front of our clients to say if you’re looking for something that is really fresh, if you’re comparing it to something like a traditional digital media strategy, oftentimes those in-market audiences or those sort of probabilistic data sets that we would have bought, you know, eight years ago, ten years ago.
Those were based on data, maybe past purchases or just search behavior online. Those people could have been sitting in that pool for 60 days, 90 days. They may have made that purchase and been long gone. So depending on your category, if it’s pet food, okay, yeah, they probably are gonna be relevant and you do need to reach them every 30 days or so.
But if it’s Home Depot in your example, I don’t know how often someone’s renovating like a deck or building a new bathroom. So it is really category specific and it does unlock a whole new strategic lens. But it does also have that cap again. Like you really have to be cognizant of what role those retail media networks are playing in your bigger strategy because.
If they are just going to be giving you access to their audiences or their inventory, you have to be mindful of that bigger picture strategy because their audiences decay as well.
Sean Jordan (13:25)
Thanks. That’s really helpful because, you know, when you when you hear about these things from the outside, which is where I am, everybody’s talking about how this is the next big thing or that’s the next big thing. And retail media networks are getting a lot of hype around them, but I’m still seeing a lot of digital marketers still kind of hands off on them yet in terms of maybe not using them for everything, but just certain strategies. So I think that that what what you’re saying there, there’s a tactical approach to it is really helpful to understand.
Savannah Westbrock (13:51)
Well, and one thing that may be more tangible and familiar to people who have bought paid social or who are familiar with the sort of Google landscape, this idea of on-site and off-site buying. So retail media networks, oftentimes if you’re buying something like Instacart because you’re working with a grocery brand, you want to be on Instacart, but they have scale issues just like anyone else. So they have to also complement what they’re selling you with.
off-site inventory, which is the equivalent of the rest of the internet, right? It’s just like Meta’s audience network or Google just saying, yeah, go ahead and turn on that extended inventory for YouTube. Like it’s not on YouTube, but it’s YouTube hosted. So it’s technically the same thing. It’s okay.
They are running into that as well because as you mentioned, everybody and their grandmother has their own retail media network now. So it’s a really great strategy for them. It makes sense for them to monetize their data, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more and more partnerships forming in these coming months and years, because they really are running into a little bit of competition and a little bit of a scale crisis.
Sean Jordan (15:04)
Yeah, I I completely agree. And I think unless you are somebody the size of Amazon or Kroger, you probably are gonna have a hard time competing with those large networks. Well, let me ask you a little bit about thinking about go-to-market strategy. So there are sometimes there are times where you can make missteps or you can, you know, plan things and they just don’t quite go your way. So
Where do you think product leaders in ad tech often make those kind of mistakes or missteps when they’re thinking about a go to market strategy?
Savannah Westbrock (15:37)
Well that’s interesting because I think as a consumer researcher, I’d be very curious for your perspective here as well. what I’ve been seeing in the past few years, whether it’s the retail media networks or like bigger ad tech players like Facebook, Google, et cetera.
I’m seeing a lot of chasing what investors might like to see, and a little bit less of what users and consumers would probably like to see. So bringing it back to that idea of like additive innovation sometimes being a bit of a trap. We’re seeing a lot of big, shiny, bright new things that nobody’s really asking for. so I’ll I guess I’ll pick on meta, and it’s easy to throw stones at Zuckerberg, so that feels safe.
The metaverse as an entire concept was something that we talked about in our industry because we had to. It was given to us and we had to figure it out. Maybe we could have found some utility there, maybe not. It sort of fizzled out organically on its own. And I think the big piece of that was we didn’t know what the consumer strategy was, right? We didn’t see it.
you also see that maybe nowadays with a lot of wearable AI tech. We haven’t quite cracked that code either. The meta glasses or any sort of AI glasses. They’re out there, they’re sleek. I’ve met a few people who maybe have them, but consumers are almost overwhelmingly rejecting them because they think it’s creepy. They don’t like the idea of someone recording them whenever they want. They’re they’re calling them pervert glasses now. And that seems like the type of thing that
could have been pretty easily predicted in your research, right? I’m wondering if if they’re reading any of this sci-fi that they name their companies after. Like that seems obvious.
Sean Jordan (17:26)
Yeah, you know, the metaverse is a great example of where I think pretty much anybody on the outside of it knew that it was gonna be a flop. And I’ll I’m I’m saying this is someone who I own a MetaQuest 2 headset. I I love virtual reality for gaming. I think it’s really fun and interesting, but I could never see using it beyond that purpose because it’s clunky and it’s not ready for prime time. And then it’s weird to interact with people in that virtual setting.
Because they look different than they sound. So I was playing a game one time and this kid’s kid walked up to me and started talking to me and they had a really thick New Zealand accent. And first of all, I don’t want to talk to kids when I’m playing games. I’m, you know, a middle-aged guy. But secondly, you know, it was it was just so bizarre because you know, you don’t have any of those cultural connections or cues to help you to kind of know how to navigate the situation. So when you’re scaling that and trying to put that in a business context and then saying, and by the way, we’re gonna also find a way to.
make advertising revenue off of this, it it there was no logical through line. And so consumers were saying that. They were saying, I can’t imagine strapping one of these things onto my face and using this every day. And nobody seemed to be listening because the hype and the money were there, but the use case wasn’t there. And I think the meta glasses are in the same boat. Aside from some really narrow use cases, I can’t imagine why most people would want to have those on their face because they’re so intrusive. And you know, even the the meta headsets, like they
make a map of your house when you’re using them, whether you realize it or not. So that’s why I always keep mine in one room that I don’t mind it mapping. But the the glasses are even more intrusive. And as we’ve seen in reporting, they pick up things that most people wouldn’t want picked up by metaglasses. So I think that’s the problem is that the tech they they’re not only not listening to the consumers, but they’re not even considering that the consumers have a valid point of view because their idea is like, if well if we put this in front of you
You’ll see the use case for it once it’s in front of you, and that’s not usually the way it works.
Savannah Westbrock (19:26)
And I love that example of, hey, I actually do use this for gaming because
Sean Jordan (19:30)
Mm-hmm.
Savannah Westbrock (19:31)
that was the one area where it was crystal clear there is a solid strategy here. But instead bringing it back to their actual go-to-market strategy, what they put in front of the community was a business strategy because they’re so financially prohibitive for a lot of people that it only made sense to do wholesale.
But what their actual ad campaign featured was someone checking into a hotel and joining a Teams call with this thing strapped to their face. It’s like, I can’t imagine anyone’s gonna want to do that. But now we’re seeing them more and more in arcades and barcades, which are really viable as a strategy. So maybe if they had slowed down and thought through, hey, how do we actually bring this to market in a way people will be excited about?
They could have had a bigger splash and something that’s a little bit more effective, but instead it was a big ol’ flop, and we’re still seeing it.
Sean Jordan (20:29)
And and this happens all the time. I mean, you know, in video games more broadly, they’ve tried to insert ads into those for decades. And, you know, they’ve tried product placement, they’ve tried digital ads that are that are more dynamic, they’ve tried ads that are interstitial. the only platform where that’s really worked has been mobile gaming. And that’s because mobile gamers don’t pay for their games. They get them for free. And because they’re not paying for them, they expect to be advertised to. But people that are putting down any money.
for a gaming product, and or any any kind of entertainment product could be a movie or or or song too. if they’re not getting it for free or for a subscription price, then they expect that there’s gonna be no advertising in it. And so the when they try to insert the those things in there as a second revenue stream, it offends the gamers and it offends them to a point where they will stop using those products. And I think that’s one thing that again, the consumers have been very clear on. You can hear it in many, many different studies.
But the tech leaders tend not to think about because again they’re kinda like, well, they’ll get used to it. They’ll they’ll ignore it after a while, rather than, they’ll stop using this product and avoid it and maybe go to a alternative.
Savannah Westbrock (21:37)
Well, and it’s interesting the moment we’re living in because I think consumers compared to ten years ago are so much savvier and aware of that value exchange. And that brings us back to the other way that programmatic is really evolving is all of the privacy cognizance and not only the regulations, but the actual demand from consumers themselves of, hey, this actually isn’t worth it for me anymore. Like
Yes, I can give you my email and now my phone number also is required for that 10% discount. it’s not worth it for me. So we’re seeing a rise in strategies that are actually mirroring what the consumers are putting forward because they don’t want to work with brands or work with rather, they don’t want to buy from brands that they feel like are gonna just harass them.
and follow them until the end of the earth, which has really been a lot of the the classic online advertising strategy.
Sean Jordan (22:35)
even even loyalty programs, they they give you very low rewards but then they ha hassle you constantly. So absolutely.
Savannah Westbrock (22:42)
Not worth it anymore. And people understand.
I think a lot of people, you know, 10, 15 years ago at that point of sales system, typing in their email, they didn’t understand. Like, this is almost like a permanent thing that I’m doing here. They weren’t aware of it. Now you cannot enter several websites without giving your data up. And people understand this is going to have long-term consequences, and even 20% off isn’t worth it.
Sean Jordan (23:12)
I I think these are these are problems that will not go away anytime soon, but as marketers we have to be aware of them for sure. And in in research, when I’m using list studies where we’ve procured a list from CRM system or something, I’m finding much higher bounce rates than I used to find because people change their email addresses more often now because they get tired of being harassed. So
Savannah Westbrock (23:30)
Yeah. Well, hence the
new requirement for your phone number as well. It’s a lot harder to change
Sean Jordan (23:36)
So
Savannah Westbrock (23:37)
your phone number. But I feel like that’s a that’s a band-aid solution, especially as consumers are paying more attention and as, you know, they do feel like companies are not listening to them about what the new features they roll out are or consumers feeling forced to adopt things that they don’t necessarily want to adopt, right? We
Had a really great conversation, Sean, about AI search being rolled out, or like, it’s here, or companies that kind of don’t have a really logical tie to sort of AI, having it suddenly be everywhere in their marketing, you know, like random CPG brands. Like, why is this chip?
company suddenly asking me to make an AI avatar. It doesn’t make sense as a consumer. It’s that additive innovation thinking again. They’re just sort of following a trend without concretely plotting a strategy of what this means to my consumer and is it going to grow my brands long term.
Sean Jordan (24:33)
Yeah, and and since you and I talked, ChatGPT or OpenAI has has discontinued or is discontinuing their browser, Atlas, which was supposed to be, I mean, if you looked at the the the beginning of the year, everybody was saying a agentic shopping is gonna be a big thing. Consumers are gonna love it and they’re gonna use these browsers to do it. And yeah, we’re not there. The tech has not only proved not proven itself, but we’re going in the opposite direction where they’re just shutting it down because people don’t want like it or want to use it.
Savannah Westbrock (25:03)
Yeah, we’re sort of in a throw spaghetti at the wall phase in a lot of this. It’s like, okay, let’s go ahead and release it. We don’t need to beta test it because the consumers will be the beta testers. Like we’ve been seeing that strategy from a product perspective for several years now. And OpenAI really, I think, turned that degree up because Chat GPT three five really
was the launch of that. Like, okay, let’s just put it out there. We need to be the name. And I think you can argue that was a great strategy for them. Like Google had a dense and really well funded AI lab. Like they could have put out something that was probably at the same level as 3.5, but ChatGPT got their name out there first. And it didn’t matter that it was clunky and hallucinated to no end because consumers didn’t know what a hallucination was at the time. They were just so impressed that the robot could talk.
Sean Jordan (25:59)
Well, this brings me to another question that I wanted to talk about, and that is that you you are now working at an AI forward organization, and you’re you’re thinking about AI a lot. but AI is a controversial topic. A lot of people have different ideas about what it is, what it means, where it’s going. So I would imagine like one of the things you guys have to do is probably work on building your culture so that you’re all kind of talking about the same thing, working in the same direction. So, how do you do that in
Savannah Westbrock (26:24)
Yeah.
Sean Jordan (26:25)
your organization?
Savannah Westbrock (26:26)
Well, this has been a really big part of my life. I also helped steward an AI council for a massive hold co as well. this is truly something I’m really passionate about because I think a lot of leaders across industries are misstepping in this area because they feel this pressure to always be
sycophantically positive about AI at all times. And again, it goes back to like not listening to, in this case, your staff or like the consumer or the culture at large. Like there are pros and cons to gen AI, to agentic AI, to machine learning.
So it’s okay to have nuanced conversations about the pros and cons. And I think when you as a leadership team open the door to that conversation, it’s going to create an environment where people feel comfortable saying, hey.
I read something that I don’t understand. Like who can I talk to? Right. And if you have engineers on staff, like I always have, your engineers who are very intimately familiar with AI, they’re gonna give it to you straight. They’re gonna tell you, these are the pros, these are the cons, this is what’s real, and this is what’s just marketing fluff. And enabling those people to have some of those conversations also I think builds trust.
But you do see a lot of maybe pressure from leadership in a lot of different companies of we’ve invested in this, we have to move forward, let’s set goals for usage, let’s get this out here. And people, whether it’s from a product perspective or stuff at work, they are gonna always hesitate if they feel like they’re being forced to do something. So it’s better to take that stance of, okay.
Let’s educate ourselves. There’s misinformation in the pro-AI camp and the anti-AI camp. Like what are we hearing? Where can we maybe redirect conversations when we need to? Or where can we pause because staff have alerted us to something that is a legitimate concern and we do need to hesitate here and we do need to have a really in-depth conversation about where we go and invite staff along in that conversation so that they don’t feel like it’s just a top-down mandate.
Sean Jordan (28:43)
Completely agree. And you know, I think one of the things that becomes so frustrating about when you’re talking about AI to the general public is that they have a lot of perceptions that are shaped by maybe stories they’ve heard media, maybe just very superficial experiences that they’ve had or frustrations they’ve had. I mean, so many people, when we talk to them in consumer research about AI, start talking about chatbot customer service that they hate, or they talk about
Savannah Westbrock (29:09)
Yeah.
Sean Jordan (29:10)
How there was some other interaction they had where they wanted to talk to a human and they couldn’t. And they were forced to talk to this chatbot that agreed with them but couldn’t do anything for them. So I I think that’s part of the problem too is that, you know, we talk about the financial bubble that might be forming around AI, but I think there’s a perceptual bubble as well where we haven’t quite figured out what this technology is gonna be going forward. We haven’t even figured out who’s gonna provide it. I mean, the controversy of the week is whether China’s gonna have models that are.
cheaper and easier and better to use than the the current models that we’re using, right? So we don’t even know where that’s going yet. But what we do know is that people are they’re they’re excited about new technology, but they’re resistant to things that they think are going to become barriers to their ability to get things done. And th those discussions are important. I think we need to have them at all levels.
Savannah Westbrock (29:59)
Well, and that’s where I go back to that definition of innovation again. And definition of AI is really important because we’re using this very broad term to talk about types of technology that are distinct and different. And the the sort of lazy answer to the question of how do you keep an AI forward culture is education.
But the way that I more earnestly answer that is by saying, like, you do have to educate people on what AI actually means.
And be distinct in your vocab and like say what you are actually talking about because there is so much marketing fluff. Like I love our industry, but we have really fluffed up AI in a lot of different ways. Like sometimes we’re talking about pretty basic software development that if we didn’t want to call it AI, if we weren’t incentivized to, we probably wouldn’t. It would just be a new feature. Other times we’re talking about
actually complicated like autonomous agents doing things. That’s a very different conversation than just, you know, something that we’re calling AI because it’s flashier if we do. And a lot of those things are getting conflated in the public knowledge, especially.
Sean Jordan (31:16)
Yeah, there’s a I I’m gonna paraphrase this because I can’t remember the exact wording, but there’s a famous quote from the early two thousands about how everything is AI when it starts, and then once we get used to it, we call it something else, like algorithm. So
Savannah Westbrock (31:27)
Totally. Yep.
Sean Jordan (31:29)
it’s it it it it really is every advance feels like it is computers getting a lot closer to being human, but with LLMs, we’ll probably have a better name for them a few years down the road to define what they’re doing, you know, because we won’t think of that as being nearly as intelligent as whatever comes after it.
Savannah Westbrock (31:46)
And I also think it’s perfectly fine as a leader, and even if you’re a leader at an AI organization and a leader in charge of AI to acknowledge like some of those genuine advances, it’s okay to opt out of right now. It’s okay to say, hey, yeah, this is cool, but it belongs in a lab. Like it doesn’t have a commercial lens. Like we don’t see the utility in this.
like one of the comparisons I’ve made before is polyester in fabric. Like I don’t necessarily want 100% polyester garments, definitely not gonna pay $200 for it. But I’m also not gonna go do a deep squat in 100% cotton denim either. Like there is a utility for synthetic fabrics.
It doesn’t mean I have to do an entire wardrobe head to toe in synthetic fabrics. Like this developed for a purpose. It has a specific purpose, but you don’t have to be 100% all or nothing with this type of stuff. Like there is specific utility, and usually you net out at some sort of blend.
Sean Jordan (32:51)
It it’s such a great analogy because I was just thinking to the clothes my grandparents used to have in their closet that were 100% polyester. They were so ugly and you never want to wear them. But today’s clothing, which a lot of times has a polyester blend in it, is so stylish and so interesting, so innovative. And it could be even things like blue jeans or, you know, button-up shirts or things like that that have polyester to make them breathe and to stretch. So there is a use for it. It’s just about thinking beyond that initial form and figuring out where it makes sense to put it.
Savannah Westbrock (33:19)
Yeah, you have to have a purpose behind what you’re doing. You have to really think through. And I do think we’re in the early days of that experimentation and we are gonna have some really like plasticky feeling garments coming off the rack that it’s okay to reject and to say, Okay, we did this. We don’t need to suddenly turn around and have a whole go-to-market strategy for that 100% polyester. It’s okay to say, okay, check.
Now let’s figure out how to actually bring this into something that is much more useful to the average everyday person and something that doesn’t feel quite as intrusive.
Sean Jordan (33:55)
And this is a great segue into another question I wanted to ask, which is as we’re thinking over time and how things evolve. I mean, when I got my marketing degree, what, 19 years ago, I think, we didn’t even talk about digital marketing. And even still in the classroom, like we have to push to make sure that that’s included in the curriculum because it’s still not, I don’t know why, but it’s still not a current topic in what we teach in the classrooms. but it’s here, it’s been here for a while, it’s gonna continue to be here, and we’re gonna, it’s gonna grow and evolve. so
How do we need to think about evolving digital marketing strategies compared to what we were doing ten or twenty years ago?
Savannah Westbrock (34:31)
Well, it’s so wild to think that we’ve gone through the past 10 years without it ending up in classroom curriculum, because my answer, ironically, would be don’t forget the fundamentals. I
Sean Jordan (34:43)
Yeah.
Savannah Westbrock (34:43)
do think, you know, we had this you know, programmatic explosion and this digital media explosion in the past 10 years where it’s almost like the pendulum swung too hard in the personalization direction.
And AI is definitely going to continue to accelerate that, probably more from the creative point of view, right? Like dynamic creative or personalized messaging is easier to do when you have LLMs powering some of that or just making it easier. But one area where we’ve swung back again is in that one-to-one in theory, like data.
We didn’t have one-to-one, but we had as close as we could possibly get with things like retargeting and CRM lists. And consumers are rejecting that a little bit. I think a lot of us are adapting our strategies in favor of contextual targeting or something similar to it based on that.
And we’re going to have to watch, okay, creative has always been a very, very important piece of this puzzle that we’ve kind of neglected, at least from my point of view, as someone who is more of a programmatic buyer. Creative was always the add-on piece or like the last piece of the puzzle.
I do think we’re going to have to go back to all right, how do we get this messaging strategy just right for this audience? Knowing that we’re going to have to pay really critical attention to how people are behaving, what they are reading, what they are consuming, and what they want to be consuming and what messaging people want to have put in front of them.
Now that we’re putting a little bit less emphasis on who they are as a person and like what their data says about them. And to me, that goes back to the marketing fundamentals. Like you need new audiences and you need great messaging to be put in front of them.
Sean Jordan (36:36)
I I so agree. And there’s nothing creepier than someone you don’t know walking up to you and starting to tell you about how they know all these really personal things about you and they just want to make you happy. It’s like, no, that’s stalker vibes, right? That’s not what I
Savannah Westbrock (36:49)
Stop it.
Sean Jordan (36:50)
want from someone I want to have a relationship with of any sort. So I think not only the contextual, but understanding how to shape that content in the right direction that it will appeal to people of a certain target audience or a certain you know.
seg segmentation without feeling creepy. feeling like it’s made for them without actually making it for them is is really key.
Savannah Westbrock (37:14)
Well, and what I would love to see, I think some of the dynamic messaging strategies I’ve seen were focused on me, the person. I think of those cheesy t-shirts you sometimes got Facebook ads for of like, hey, Savannah in St. Louis. It’s like, no, stop, that’s horrible.
Sean Jordan (37:30)
Yeah.
Savannah Westbrock (37:31)
But what you could do is, you know, infer from the content people are reading in real time and say, hey, you’re interested in X, let me show you why.
And in that way it is personalized, it’s relevant to me, but it’s not me the person. And that feels so much more likely to be relevant to me and to get my attention.
Sean Jordan (37:52)
So true. So true. Well, this has been such an enlightening and interesting discussion. And I’m I I’m so glad that you were able to come on Marketing Gateway and just share some of these perspectives with us. Cause, you know, I talk about these things sometimes on different episodes of the show, but you’ve really helped me think differently about some of these topics. So I appreciate that.
Savannah Westbrock (38:13)
I’m glad. Thank you so much for the time, Sean. This has been great.
Sean Jordan (38:15)
Yeah. And
let me let me offer you one more thing and that is something I offer every
Savannah Westbrock (38:19)
Yes.
Sean Jordan (38:19)
guest and that is a chance to plug something. We’re all marketers. We all have an opportunity to talk about something that we love and care about. So here’s your chance. You can plug anything you want. Go for it.
Savannah Westbrock (38:29)
Well, Sean, up at the tippy top, you mentioned that you had seen me speak in a presentation that was called Producing Producers. And we will be adapting that into a content series where we can go a lot deeper into some of that content. So the origin of that presentation was trying to get out of our marketing bubble, right? We talk to each other a lot, and it’s really easy to use our shared vocabulary.
But myself, my colleagues Ryan Green and Allie Hopp were looking at how can we take inspiration from music producers, film producers, TV producers, people who work on really complicated projects and get done the type of work that shapes our culture in ways that as marketers we often have to respond to and be cognizant of and react to.
So we only had forty-five minutes in that AMA talk and we had so much more to say. So stay tuned for that. We hope to have it out in the marketplace very soon.
Sean Jordan (39:30)
That’s great. And I I’ll put in the show notes a link to my recap of that. But I I’m gonna say one thing I remember, I don’t remember who it was that brought it up, but one of you guys brought up Chris Jenner and there was like a hiss in the audience. So you got the right reaction. People were engaged.
Savannah Westbrock (39:46)
We loved the opportunity to look at like, okay, Quincy Jones, Chris Jenner, and then I talked about Greg Daniels, who is like one of my favorite,
Sean Jordan (39:54)
yeah, I love I love that. Yeah.
Savannah Westbrock (39:56)
favorite people. Like there’s so many lessons that you can learn just from studying how do these experts in their own fields. And yeah, we did consider Chris Jenner an expert at doing what only she has done. So we loved pulling those lessons together. It’s been a great time.
Sean Jordan (40:13)
It was a fantastic talk and I’d love to see the extended cut of it just to see what else you guys can share. So thanks so much for being on the marketing gateway. It has been a pleasure.
Savannah Westbrock (40:23)
Thank you, Sean. We’ll chat soon.
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