Artificial Intelligence for Growth Companies — Eric Vardon // Morphio

Quotes

• “I practice on my parents so I try to convince them if they know what AI for marketing is, I think we’ve done a good job with our messaging. I’ve been on the industry for over 20 years and always on the service side with enough tack to be dangerous. I think now is the time for us marketers to take it to the next level.” -Eric“Technology for the most part for us, even as a fairly large yet independent agency with many Fortune 500 different brands, we couldn’t afford the enterprise solutions that are out there even on behalf of our client spend.” -Eric “In the mid-market, there just wasn’t anything that was good enough that was affordable for us. So for a very long time, you end up throwing people at problems. When you are looking at scale and you’re scaling quickly and throwing it at people is only going to end up in stressed-out workers and it’s a strategy that doesn’t always come into fruition.” -Eric“The idea that artificial intelligence and advanced machine learning has been an enterprise solution. My big takeaway from all the conversations I’ve had about AI is, you need an incredible amount of data. You need data scientists to actually pull it off and do it well and that means that the downtrodden companies or growth companies don’t really get access to these sophisticated technologies and not just because they are incredibly expensive but also those companies just don’t have the volume of the data.” -Ben “Most of us marketers love to play around with that new shiny toy. As marketers, we are ultimately strategists and we want to problem-solve and our job is to look at our client’s budgets and do as best as we can with it and in the given landscape, the complexity to manage those day-to-day needs are unbelievable extensive.” -Eric “When we look to tools, we look for them to be as smart as we need to be, they need to be as agile as they need to be, they need to be built properly, and to your point, they need to have all sorts of data tying into them. At the end of the day, in the infancy of AI specifically in marketing, it’s just not been around long enough.” -Eric“I think the landscape, for the most part, is, it being crunching data faster than humans can and trying to present as many decision or data points so that we can make decisions morequickly and ultimately we are trying to solve a lot of time barriers right now because, for most of us in the service world, that is our core issue.” -Eric“I think the landscape is more of shared data and it is individual businesses or companies like ours that are creating everything from scratch or building our own algorithms from scratch.” -Eric“Data is only as smart as how it’s coming out and going in and ultimately goes back to the same thing as we need to put a layer of human strategy on to it to actually learn and teach the data what it is that we need to do.” -Eric“A lot of the tools out there aren’t and don’t have the option for us to educate and inform the algorithms. A lot of that is going on in the background on its own and with more user feedback it loops that, to me, is where it starts to see huge value add across light enterprise solutions. I think that’s the huge piece of what is missing in the market today.” -Eric “The glaring obvious points are time. We all want to solve our client’s business problems and we all want more time on execution but outside of our day-to-day there is this deluge of data analysis which I think a lot of times we thought that more tools or the right tools would actually help us increase our time and I thinkit’s a bit of a fantasy.” -Eric“Traditionally, a lot of how we make our money is service-based and we’re hour by hour, again relating to time. We have to maximize even small percentages across our entire day or our team’s day in a way that is going to create enough impact for us to potentially generate more traffic.” -Eric“When you get back to what it is we do as marketers, the strategy side, of course, is where we want to spend our time but I find that majority of the solutions out there are causingmore friction than a solution.” -Eric“My takeaway is that there is a new way to work and even in the last decade we have seen the rise of the MarTech industry. We’ve gone from a couple of hundred companies to 7,000 companies in the space and there are lots of point solutions that which are all trying to address a sort of other fundamental problem that we are being asked to make decisions faster, improve our processes with fewer resources and hopefully technology is helping us.” -Ben“Software automation needs to be a fourth component to your business. It’s not the tools that are underlying to help you run the business, it’s actually a functioning form of what it is that you do. So a lot of companies will build or employ their own technology but I think R&D arm or the employment of automation. I think it’s actually a component of the business and not something that is underlying running it. That is a huge differentiation in terms of framing it. It needs to be part of the ethos of companies especially when you scale.” -Eric