Talking Shizzle

Building a Marketing Machine: AI's Role and Realistic Expectations

• Taylor Shanklin

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About the Guest(s):

Adam Kerpelman is the founder of Marketing Machine and an educator in the fields of entrepreneurship and generative AI at the University of Virginia. He is dedicated to improving marketing practices through his educational content and a popular newsletter that compiles insights from a variety of sources.

Mark Richardson serves as the VP of Demand Generation at Marketing Machine. With a history of significantly contributing to newsletter growth and a recent appointment to the board of a custom collectible card company, Richardson focuses on educational content and AI processes to enhance marketing strategies.

Episode Summary:

In this exciting episode of Talking Shizzle, host Taylor Wilson has an insightful conversation with marketing experts Adam Kerpelman and Mark Richardson. Both guests shed light on the evolving landscape of marketing, particularly focusing on how generative AI is reshaping marketing strategies and funnels. They emphasize the need to incorporate AI as a tool to enhance human creativity without replacing it, stressing AI’s role in maximizing efficiency across marketing processes.

Mark and Adam explore the analogy of marketing as a machine, circling down into the processes of building effective marketing funnels. They discuss the importance of foundational elements, the critical nature of setting realistic expectations, and the ongoing challenge of the marketing-sales dynamic in organizations. By leveraging their collective expertise, they provide a roadmap for optimizing marketing workflows and ensuring alignment across business functions. Their dialogue unpacks the myth that marketing automation can solve all problems, highlighting the importance of discipline, foundational practices, and internal communication for success.

Key Takeaways:

  • Generative AI as Brainstorm Buddy: AI is a powerful tool for extending creativity and efficiency in marketing but should begin where human insight ends, acting as an innovative brainstorming partner rather than a full replacement for human creativity.
  • Building the Marketing Machine: Constructing an effective marketing process requires foundational setup, realistic expectation management, and a focus on both testing and production phases.
  • Alignment of Sales and Marketing: Successful companies often have strong communication channels between marketing and sales, emphasizing collaboration rather than blame for achieving shared goals.
  • Communicating Marketing Value: Marketers must be able to clearly report on their activities and contributions, particularly in translating testings and optimizations into tangible outcomes such as leads and conversions.
  • Expectation Management in Implementation: Setting appropriate timelines and understanding the complexity of launching marketing initiatives can preempt unrealistic expectations and backlash.

Resources:


Transcript

0:00:02 Taylor Shanklin: Hey, hey, all you lovely people out there, you’ve got a lot going on in your day with big dreams and big goals for your world. Are you ready to talk some shizzle and learn some shizzle from leading entrepreneurs, change makers, coaches, and overall interesting people who like to shake things up? I’m your host, Taylor Shanklin, CEO and founder of Creative Shizzle. And I am stoked to bring you a fresh episode of Talking Shizzle today.

0:00:32 Taylor Shanklin: This show is all about helping you think differently so that you can grow. Talking Shizzle is brought to you by our team at Creative Shizzle, where we help businesses, entrepreneurs and social good innovators make amazing marketing shizzle happen. Check us out on the web@creativeshizzle.com. now let’s talk some shizzle. All right.

0:01:02 Taylor Shanklin: Hello. Welcome. Welcome back to another fresh episode of Talking Shizzle. I am super pumped to talk to marketing machine Mark Richardson and Adam Kerpelman. It’s been a while since we’ve talked. We were just talking offline about how we follow each other’s lives on Instagram and catching up about all the fun things there. But yeah, let’s roll. I think we’ve got some good stuff to talk about today. Give us a quick intro, Adam. Well start with you on just kind of what youre up to, who you are, what youre about these days.

0:01:34 Adam Kerpelman: Absolutely. Great to be here. Yeah. Im Adam Kerpelman, founder of Marketing Machine, which is the brand through which I publish sort of educational content, stuff like that. We have a newsletter thats the main thing right now. If you want to go sign up, the goal is just to help people be a better marketer. Really. We cover all kinds of stuff. The main thing with the newsletter right now is a news roundup goes out every Friday that seems really popular. We watch all kinds of crazy sources that we follow to be better marketers and distill the good stuff for you.

0:02:07 Adam Kerpelman: And then when I’m not doing that, I teach entrepreneurship and generative AI at the University of Virginia. So with that, that half of my week, Professor Kerp at your service.

0:02:19 Taylor Shanklin: What about you, Mark? What’s going on?

0:02:21 Mark Richardson: How’s it going? Mark Richardson, VP, demand gen here at marketing machine. It’s awesome to be back. Yeah. Great to follow everyone’s travels in progress over the last few years. And we’ve been running this newsletter growth now for a little over a year, I guess, and been sort of pivoting to the educational content. I recently accepted a position on the board for a new custom collectible card company.

0:02:49 Mark Richardson: So a lot of my focus is going to be moving that direction called in case cards be sticking on with marketing machine in sort of a advisor capacity. We do office hours every week where folks can pop into our discord and ask us questions about entrepreneurship, about AI enablement processes, ways to think about marketing their own products. We have a lot of kind of postgrad folks join in, like talking about apps they’re launching and ways to do better marketing. Really. That’s kind of our, that’s our big hashtag, be a better marketer. So any way I can help brands do that is where I get my rocks off.

0:03:27 Taylor Shanklin: That’s cool. It’s fun being a marketing preneur, you know, like kind of dabbling in some different things. Okay, I want to talk to you. This generative AI thing, it’s a topic that’s coming up frequently, sometimes more than I feel like talking about it. You literally scroll through your social media feeds and you’re like, I’m not doing enough AI. Like, because there are so many things now being blasted at us about AI, and AI is wonderful, and we’re using AI in a variety of ways.

0:04:01 Taylor Shanklin: And at the same time, I think we need to peel back the onion a little bit and talk through how it’s really sort of like changing marketing in general, building marketing funnels and how we think about content. So that’s a lot. Professor Kirp, go, I can.

0:04:23 Adam Kerpelman: That’s the thing, right? If there’s one thing, you get practice. So the funny thing I didn’t expect, having been like, a lifelong coach and a teacher of everyone who’s worked for me and writer of things and whatever, I didn’t expect how stressful it would actually be to have to get on my feet twice a week for an hour and a half to just talk in front of a room full of, like, 19 and 20 year olds. The public speaking engagement on the regular turned into a thing where I’ve got the hang of it now. But I realized early on, like, why am I so. And it was like, oh. Cause I have to give a TED talk twice a week.

0:04:58 Adam Kerpelman: I mean, it’s longer than a TED talk, but now I’ve gotten really good at, hey, you want me to kill an hour and a half? I can do it.

0:05:05 Mark Richardson: And you’ll come out feeling more educated after. Imagine that.

0:05:09 Adam Kerpelman: The broad thing I’ll say for anybody, sort of not the reason that it’s everywhere or the real thing that happened when, like, chat GPT happened. And everybody started to go, oh, what’s this thing? First, everybody started saying, oh, is this another blockchain? Like is this another cryptocurrency? Like everybody’s so excited about it. And the difference here is like blockchain and cryptocurrency is a big deal if the promise could have manifest, right, which is to make banks work better.

0:05:39 Adam Kerpelman: But like, those are institutions that are going to be impossible to replace. I generative AI and the stuff that chat GPT showed us is possible now with machine learning and then like mid journey and the image generation and all that kind of stuff showed us that we really are moving into like a paradigm shift in computing mechanisms that you can, I think, equate to like the invention of the calculator or the invention of the spreadsheet or something like that. Wherever this general purpose tool to help us with writing instead of math, if you want to follow the calculator analogy, suddenly exists.

0:06:18 Adam Kerpelman: And so like, of course that’s suddenly going to be everywhere. The question is how much does it fit into your given sort of workflow or your given industry or a client’s industry, or however you want to look at it, and then what’s the actual impact going to be if you look at how Apple is deploying it, they’re building it in wherever the text boxes are inside of their operating system to basically have better spell check.

0:06:50 Adam Kerpelman: Hey, write this email a little better for me. Write this text a little better for me. That’s not that crazy. But over on the marketing side, if you are running complex b, two b funnels where you’re trying to publish five blog posts a week, and you’re already working with an outsourced team of blog authors based on subject matter, expert interviews, blah blah blah, that is very much in the space where you might be able to get a four or five x multiplier on what is already sort of just like an iterative remix cycle to try to play like an SEO and exposure and content game, the reality is, it’s very real.

0:07:30 Adam Kerpelman: The reason it’s everywhere is because it’s huge, but also because the Internet’s going to Internet and it’s immediately doing its like hype cycle thing on top of it, and all the companies are saying, oh, it’s what I used to do. Plus AI, can I get more money? And so that part of it’s natural, but the part I caution on and bump into in academia, like in my life teaching, there are a lot of machine learning and AI professors who have been at it since the eighties, right? Like they’re data science people, they’re computer science people, and they kind of say, yeah, every ten years there’s a hype cycle and everybody gets all excited and it’s the same old.

0:08:07 Adam Kerpelman: This one really, I really know is real because I have insisted that everyone on my team use it, and they all come back and go, I can’t believe they use it for six weeks. And then they come back and go, I can’t remember how I used to write blog posts before this existed. So that’s what I’m going on. I’m not going on a hype cycle. I’m going on, like, we have experience on the ground of me saying all of my students are using it. Like, I didn’t even like the argument about whether or not you should let students use it.

0:08:35 Adam Kerpelman: Don’t even bother. They’re all using it. Can’t stop them, can’t detect it. It’s just how it works, which, like, from a just generalized communication standpoint, like, I’m kind of okay with. I mean, I. We can get in the weeds and all manner of different aspects of it, but, like, the idea of minimum competent communication, verbal communication, being available to everyone feels to me in the end, like, it’s probably better for humanity because, like, maybe eventually we get, like, Star Trek’s, you know, universal translator and we can stop having silly conflicts just because people misunderstood the meaning of a word in a sentence. But that’s the crazy technologist piece.

0:09:20 Adam Kerpelman: I think everybody here probably wants to get into the weeds on the marketing side, right? So.

0:09:25 Taylor Shanklin: Well, I mean, I’m curious, Mark. Maybe you’ve got some thoughts on it and also curious to see, like, and when we think about, like, the funnel and, like, demand gen and, like, building, we were talking a little bit offline about, like, it’s like, when you go build a marketing program, it is like building a machine. So, like, where are you finding it most helpful? What cogs in the machine you find it, like, to work the best for? Maybe, you know?

0:09:54 Mark Richardson: Yeah, I mean, definitely think about it like an assembly line. You know, when we think about both internally and externally as part of kind of our marketing machine methodology that KIRP and I have implemented and seen success with over the years, it’s, you know, it’s thinking about. And I’ll start internally. You know, I think the beauty of AI as it currently exists is to kind of spur brainstorm. And I think you’ll probably hear this from a lot of influencers. It’s like, you shouldn’t replace your good ideas or your creativity as a. As someone who understands the landscape, as someone who has hopefully done a fair amount of market research for your clients or audience, research, understanding, you know, the types of content that your audience is going to respond to is already responding to the things that they already follow and how to, how to lean into that. So those are all what I would consider good prompting.

0:10:47 Mark Richardson: Using what you already know, using your inferences and your own intelligence to feed this large language model that has many other permutations or calls to action, emotional appeals, all those fun marketing outputs. It’s figuring out where the human can end and where the AI can take over to be a time multiplier. I don’t espouse it any more to try to replace good ideas, but it’s to see, oh, okay, if I give it some of my good ideas and ask for 100 more, then maybe 25 of those outputs are things that I can push into market.

0:11:25 Mark Richardson: It might have taken me 2 hours to come up with the particular spin on real estate development in San Diego, for example. What are the core value appeals and value propositions that’s going to appeal to someone looking to do a deal to build a high rise in San Diego that might take you like four or 5 hours to really get intimate with on your own. Whereas chat, GPT or Gemini could probably spit out some good ideas that you could put in an ad campaign and test in the San Diego market. And then, as we always say, be data driven. You don’t have to argue about the right headline in Google Ads. Now with responsive ads.

0:12:04 Mark Richardson: Google’s been using AI in its media buying for the last ten years. We’ve already had it, Facebook has had it. You may not see it, but if you’ve been working in these ad management tools, you’ve already been using AI for at least the last eight years, I would say, if not maybe ten or twelve years, just to optimize your bidding and all that good stuff. So I think it’s a question of where does the human take your hands off the wheel, and then when does, when you put your hands back on the wheel?

0:12:33 Mark Richardson: Because I don’t think generative AI without guardrails is the solution. You’re always going to have to edit and kind of refine for your particular use case.

0:12:43 Taylor Shanklin: Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting because there’s all of this external information that we as people go out into the world and get. I agree. I like how you’re kind of framing that where there’s the human kind of end and the AI began, and then where do you reenter? Just thinking about you go out into the world and gain all of this knowledge about a particular sector, you know, like, I was just at a conference last week, two of them, and, like, learning about different things going on in these two different sectors and then coming back and then using AI to think through, like, well, how do I do some follow up or like, give me some ideas? But it’s like the AI would never have any idea about how to, like, start the project around that. You know, like, you’ve gotta, as a person, go out and know there’s this thing I’m trying to do. There’s these people who care about this in this thing.

0:13:37 Taylor Shanklin: I’m trying to put together some ideas around a campaign, help me out. So, like, I really like to use chat GBT as, like, my brainstorm buddy, you know, where like, I’m kind of taking all of this external information and experience that I have, like, in the real world and then using it to help me, like, but I can’t think of anything. Almost like a, like a colleague sitting near my desk, like, back in the mad men days. Like, we’re throwing around ideas, you know, in the room.

0:14:05 Taylor Shanklin: And now I’m like, doing it with chat GPT.

0:14:09 Mark Richardson: It’s one thing that chat GPT is not at the level of, I think, about our CDP project at Netwise. Before we were bought by Dun and Bradstreet, Kirp and I worked for a company called Netwise, which was a challenger data provider brand. One of our major projects was basically tying together a bunch of disparate data sources and coming up with sort of a standard taxonomy for tracking events and moving accounts through the pipeline from sort of a website traffic to MQL to SQL to close deal.

0:14:40 Mark Richardson: And in order to do that, you might not have all the same stakeholders in a company that’s five employees versus a company that’s 30 employees, for example. So, like, internal consensus building diplomacy, sort of selling through an idea to achieve a larger end. I think those are the sort of creative parts of the machine internally that AI is probably not. It doesn’t have a lived experience of understanding personalities, of understanding team dynamics, understanding which team members function better in the afternoon than on a morning meeting, all those soft skill types of things. I think it’s still heavily gapped, but like I said, that’s where the human experience comes in and can say, okay, this process is like 75% there, but for us, it doesn’t totally make sense.

0:15:30 Mark Richardson: So we’re going to refine that last 25% from what the AI gave us.

0:15:34 Adam Kerpelman: It ties back to a thing we talk about a lot in the context of the idea of the marketing machine, which is like where exactly the seam is in the machine between the foundation and whatever. But if you want to chase the machine methodology, right, you imagine this thing is going to be chugging along and shaking like in some kind of cartoon. If it’s built on sand, it’s going to slowly sink and then fall apart.

0:15:55 Adam Kerpelman: You have to have foundational aspects of the whole thing working properly or else AI is not even going to help you. And so I think a lot of times when something like AI pops up, or even before that it was marketing automation pops up or CRM tools pop up or whatever, right? Like, and every new thing is like, oh, well, this is going to solve attribution for us. Oh, this is going to solve, you know, and like the number of times I’ve come in and a client has said, here are these tools we are considering that promise they’ll solve attribution.

0:16:23 Adam Kerpelman: And then I have to say, no, the thing you need is a spreadsheet and the actual human practice of generating links with the proper UTM parameters and putting them in the spreadsheet, that’s what you need. You don’t need a fancy new tool. It’s going to cost you thousands of dollars a year. You need discipline. AI is not going to make up for aspects of that. There’s places where it can maybe make it more efficient and if you plug it in in the right.

0:16:47 Adam Kerpelman: And so even when I’ve dealt with people that are trying to figure out how to deploy AI very frequently, we still have to start with a step back that says, well, here are certain aspects of like marketing best practice or content production best practice that you’re not doing, and AI is not going to fix that. And that includes understanding the needs of the client or understanding the needs of the market you’re targeting and things like that. That, yeah, it can help you maybe get there faster, but you still have to be the human in the loop in terms of validating if that’s right or not.

0:17:23 Adam Kerpelman: The way I say it to my students is chat GPT said so will never be an acceptable excuse for a wrong answer or for a poor answer. And so you don’t get to come to me and say, well, I should have gotten a better grade than a c because chat GPT misled me. Okay, well, you’re the QA layer. It’s your job to look at that and say, well, that’s not right if that means you need to do extra research, which sort of gets me to the rabbit hole of the student side of this, which is once you put that layer on there, I think some of the students are actually doing more work in the end because they’re having to go do the research to check the output from these things.

0:17:56 Adam Kerpelman: But they’re using a cool new tool, so they think they’re cheating and so they’re excited about it. But like, that’s the main thing, right? And people say, well, where can AI provide an optimization? In my marketing flow that’s like, if you don’t already, like, let’s use content as an example because it’s fairly clean. And everybody I think, can imagine the flow that goes from subject matter expert into blog post, one sheet, whatever you’re trying to produce, right?

0:18:20 Adam Kerpelman: If you don’t already have that flow articulated and you don’t understand what human would otherwise be in charge of each of those assets being good enough to go, then I can’t tell you where to plug AI in to produce efficiencies or to reduce the hours that it’s going to take for a human to do that kind of thing. And so that’s one of the big things is people come and they want to talk about AI and end up still talking about the same old marketing best practice things, which is like, well, what you need first is a, yeah.

0:18:54 Adam Kerpelman: Coherent notion of how content gets created inside of this department. Because if you don’t have that, AI is not going to magically drum it up for you. Although you could ask AI what a good workflow is for blog posts and it’ll give you some ideas and maybe, you know, but it’s just not magical in the way. I mean, it’s magical in a lot of ways.

0:19:13 Mark Richardson: Honestly, you just described a great copilot. Like if Google would deploy a UTM copilot where you could say, hey, don’t let any ads go live unless they have a UTM string that matches this taxonomy. I think you just happened upon a really wonderful tool.

0:19:30 Taylor Shanklin: I think that’s such a good point because maybe that’s where some of my annoyances come in. With all the marketing around AI, where it’s, so much of it is making it seem like, and this takes us into the next thing I want to talk about, so much of it makes it seem like it’s just magic. You just turn it on and it’s just going to completely become like your whole marketing department hold up. Not really.

0:19:54 Taylor Shanklin: And, you know, like, I sometimes go down these rabbit holes of like, let me try this one out, I’ll do the free trial on this. And then I get in there and I’m like, the sucks without, like, really putting some, like, thought into it, you know? And so I think I want to talk about next and, you know, around helping to better set our expectations around building a marketing machine, because AI is one of the things where people get this impression of, like, well, it’s just magic.

0:20:23 Taylor Shanklin: Just, just use it, turn it on. It’ll be fine. It’s gonna make everything, you know, we see that in all sorts of things. You know, when social media came about and people started having viral, things go viral, and soon we can talk about that. And now you hear, like, can’t you just make this go viral?

0:20:40 Adam Kerpelman: Right?

0:20:40 Taylor Shanklin: Like, that’s even sort of like an old kind of a statement now. And people are like, now we understand that you not just that easy. So let’s talk a little bit about when you’re building a marketing program or a marketing funnel around anything. Like, let’s talk about the machine that it is and, like, how we can appropriately set expectations around all of the work. This one’s for the marketers in the back that goes into the machine before, like, you start getting results.

0:21:14 Adam Kerpelman: Well, it’s for the marketers in the back, but hopefully we can give them a snippet to give to their clients and or bosses to understand, like, what is actually. And again, I really like the machine analogy here because I imagine, you know, you’re working at a plant that makes, I don’t know, golf clubs, right? And you hire a new mechanical engineer. And that mechanical engineer’s job is to stand up a process where instead of having humans put the grip tape, you know, the shaft, you’re going to have a machine put the grip tape on the shaft. But instead, what this engineer is presented with is a blank space in the corner of the warehouse where they’re supposed to build this machine.

0:21:56 Adam Kerpelman: Well, you wouldn’t come back 20 days later and go, hey, where’s my machine? Because the engineer is going to go, I am still just drawing things to make sure that I don’t spend a bunch of money on machining metal parts that then don’t go together properly to achieve the aim that you’re going for. In that context, everybody goes, yeah, of course. You want that person to take their time. You want them to set up the right thing. You want whatever.

0:22:18 Adam Kerpelman: And that engineer’s going to come in and go, look, there’s not going to be a thing in that corner that does the thing for probably a year, maybe more. If you’re talking about building out that kind of thing, because all of our tools are digital. Marketers live in a world where our clients or our leaders often expect this turnaround, where they’re like, hey, it’s been 30 days. Like, where’s my money machine? How come I’m not seeing ROI on this expense, on marketing?

0:22:47 Adam Kerpelman: And some of that’s crazy just on a technical level, because, say, you paid me to run Google Ads for you. I’m not even through enough cycles that I feel good about the algorithmic optimization that Google provides. And if you want me to get somebody from Google on the line to explain to you how that works, I can do that, or you could take my word for it. And that’s not even to get into the foundational stuff that I was talking about previously, which is there’s just always a lot of stuff to set up, and there’s always a lot of human elements to that, which is to say, like, you have to figure out project management workflows, you have to figure out where the stuff lives, you have to get all the things. And then some of it’s just boring technical stuff, right? Do you have a LinkedIn page? You don’t have that?

0:23:32 Adam Kerpelman: Well, I gotta set that up. That’s gonna take a couple of days of this, that, and another thing. Oh, you wanna do LinkedIn lives? Guess what? You can’t do that until you have 150 followers for your non existent page, which I have to run a campaign to get for you so that we can start to have anyway. I feel like that’s in the weeds. But the reality is, the hard thing with marketing is everybody’s so subject to marketing in their entire life that they think they know how it works.

0:23:58 Adam Kerpelman: And so your boss comes in and says, well, can’t we just do a campaign that’s blah, blah, blah? And it’s like, just because you can say it with just in there doesn’t mean you can actually do it really quickly. But how to actually manage those expectations? I’ve never come up with anything except to, like, put together the thing and really just try to from the outset, like, before you even hire me, to just make very clear, like, look, here are the steps, here are the things that need to happen.

0:24:25 Adam Kerpelman: We crush it, but the reason we crush it is because we insist on making sure that aspects of this are the set up properly. And so the machine analogy has helped me a lot because I can say, look, here’s this phase. 90 to 150 days of machine building. Like, don’t expect any ROI. I might be able to pull it off because we are going to go after low hanging fruit quickly. But there’s a lot of stuff that needs to be put in place, that needs to be optimized. It needs to be sort of tested before anything is going to start popping out the other side.

0:25:00 Adam Kerpelman: And that 90 to 150, that’s me being overly aggressive and sort of talking in b two c numbers. If you’re talking about a b, two b situation. The biggest mismatch, I find is between marketing expectations and understanding sales cycles, which is crazy because you talk to the finance department and they’re like, yeah, we close most of our deals in November. And I’m like, okay, then get off my back about marketing ROI in January.

0:25:28 Adam Kerpelman: It’s like we’ve been at it for a month and most of these deals aren’t going to close for nine months.

0:25:33 Mark Richardson: I just wanted to piggyback because I think you’re right on target. Because something that people, especially clients or folks, if you’re brought on even in house, there’s existing challenges. It’s important to ask the question, are we fixing a campaign that’s been in market or are we launching something brand new? More often than not, launching something brand new is going to require a significant amount. Whether it’s a month to three months. We usually budget three months worth of testing.

0:26:01 Mark Richardson: You know, if you think about a feature film that goes out, it’s not just the camera crew, the actors, the director, the writers that go into premiering a film. You know, there’s market research, there’s focus groups, there’s people, you know, talking about character types and all the sort of background data that you, the viewer, you, the audience member has, has no idea. When you walk into Deadpool and Wolverine has been happening for the last three or four years to set up this product. So there’s been a machine that’s been testing, you know, assumptions and affinities and, oh, you know, I love this. I want to see more of that. You know, but you don’t see that when you go to see the movie. You just see the finished product.

0:26:45 Mark Richardson: So I think there’s an assumption that, okay, we’re going to deploy this amazing ad campaign immediately and it’s going to immediately start driving sales. Well, that’s a sales expectation. When we talk about marketing, a lot of marketing is gathering market data and it’s research. So setting the expectation of, we’re going to push out this copy, we’re going to push out these images, this branding, and we’re just gathering data.

0:27:11 Mark Richardson: We don’t have the expectation that this is going to crush at a $10 acquisition cost and get us $4,000 worth of ROI. Whatever. Whatever the client wants, whatever the unreasonable assumption may be, when they go, well, can’t you just, with that, just doing such heavy lifting. Can’t you just do it? Can’t you just make it awesome immediately? No, sorry.

0:27:35 Adam Kerpelman: The real thing that nobody likes to hear is that you need to consider marketing way sooner than you think if you want it to fit into the business plan the way that the most. I was gonna say founders, but it’s anybody running a company, like, they tend to think, oh, okay, now we need marketing. Usually you’re six months too late by the time that you’re thinking that. And this is part of what’s caused me to drift to, like, undergraduate education is, like, I’m hopeful that I can maybe put myself in a position to get some business leaders to understand this stuff a bit sooner because it hurts them, because then they’re going.

0:28:09 Adam Kerpelman: And they end up hiring an agency that’s making promises that are unrealistic for how the mechanics of this stuff works, because they just want the contract. And so they’re going, well, these, you know, and then I find myself when I’m, you know, as an agency, like, when I’m in the agency seat, I find competition where they’re saying, well, this agency over here is saying they can do it. And it’s like, okay, well, I don’t want to upset you, but they’re lying.

0:28:32 Adam Kerpelman: So I. So this is a funny one coming off of what Mark was saying about movies. I took a film production law class in law school, and the professor of that class said a thing that I repeatedly, I think of all the time. He said the actual most. You might imagine there’s a bunch of execs sitting around going, yeah, Deadpool, we can make that. He said, no, here’s the hierarchy of power inside of a studio, it’s the marketing department.

0:28:57 Adam Kerpelman: Because if the marketing department comes in and goes, we can’t sell that, then it shuts down all the conversations. Then it’s the legal department. Because if legal says that’ll get us sued, it shuts down all the conversations. Then it’s finance. Who says, well, we can’t make any money off of that. Then it’s creative. So the place where it’s, like, people are mad that they make not creative movies, you’re mad at the, like, person batting fourth in the lineup of who gets to make a decision on whether or not this thing goes. And the marketing department is actually the most powerful one because they’re the ones that come and go, hey, we focus grouped this and it’s just not going to fly.

0:29:32 Adam Kerpelman: And then everybody goes, cool. Then we don’t even have to worry if they’re going to get sued over it because it’s not going to work. So we’re out.

0:29:38 Taylor Shanklin: So they’re listened to in the movie business.

0:29:42 Adam Kerpelman: Also, to Mark’s point, the other part they don’t tell you is when they say, oh, it costs $300 million to make, you know, whatever, Deadpool, that doesn’t include the marketing budget, and the marketing budget is usually another 300 million because that’s just what it costs to make somebody even know about the thing that exists. And that’s, and you’re talking about Deadpool, right? Like you got the power of Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds to just show up on social media and whatever.

0:30:11 Adam Kerpelman: It still costs the same as the budget of the movie, just to get people on the street to know that the thing is coming out so they can show up that Friday and get their box office numbers. And I mean, that’s a perfect transition back into what we were actually talking about, which is that’s just how hard marketing is. And so the thing that’s frustrating in the way that we do stuff and the sort of like machine methodology, and I say tough just because it’s the thing that we have to expectation manage against upfront in terms of how fast stuff will roll out, is after that foundational period, we’re going to be considerably better than the competition because we’re not just immediately slamming stuff in market and saying, I mean, we are, but we’re doing it in a methodical testing way in order to optimize the stuff where, let’s use the b two B cycle as an example.

0:31:06 Adam Kerpelman: In January, I’m running stuff so that I know that the stuff we’re running in September, October and November is going to crush leading into the annual planning conversations. That’s the reason for all the purchasing decisions later in the year. And that stuff’s all going to be five times better because of the stuff in January, February, March that we ran to see like, okay, how’s the market feeling this year? How are we on these things? How much should we say AI versus intelligence data versus this other thing?

0:31:38 Adam Kerpelman: Testing all that stuff is the beginning of setting up the machine in any given year so that we can really hammer it and know that the stuff that we’re pouring money into is actually going to be that money machine. It just takes the time to do that. And so that part of whoever’s supplying the budget saying, okay, but you’re spending all this money, what are you spending it on? A lot of times just testing, just like R and D.

0:32:05 Adam Kerpelman: Testing versus production is the thing that we came up with somewhere along the way as a way to think of this, which is, it’s a thing I keep consistent, but it’s like, and again, the machine analogy came very organically out of how we ended up setting up our marketing programs. And there are a lot of like, just levers and sliders, and you manipulate them at different times in the year based on different things. And so what I just described, where we’re testing heavy earlier in the year is like, if you imagine a slider between how much money is going into testing versus production is what I call it, and to define those testing is any ad campaign or like any motion that I am expecting to get nothing but learnings from.

0:32:51 Adam Kerpelman: If we have one that hits and it results in a bunch of leads, hey, that’s a bonus. And it happens pretty often. But largely, I’m expecting that budget to just be spent on learnings. And then the production budget is us running stuff that we know works either from best practice or from prior testing. And so you can manipulate that slide. And so earlier in the year, we’ll start out at 60% testing, 40% production, knowing like, okay, we’re going to run our previous winners or we’re going to run things that’s like, okay, everybody loves a downloadable PDF, lead Magnet, whatever, right? Like get that going.

0:33:27 Adam Kerpelman: Keep that in our production subset. But over in our 60% is the, let’s launch podcasts, see if that’s popular. Let’s launch a newsletter, see if people sign up. Let’s figure out our social, let’s start putting money into ads that are testing out different messaging, all that kind of stuff. And then you can manipulate that slider throughout the year so that when we get to purchasing season, now we’re doubling down on, now we’re back, now we’re 80 20. And so we’ve doubled up on the 40% that we got working over that time and still keeping that 20% R and D spend, basically, that’s been super effective for us over a decade of thinking about it that way.

0:34:09 Adam Kerpelman: But I still go and present budgets where they go, why is this 20% just hanging out over here? And I’m like, yeah, that’s R and D. And marketing needs R and D.

0:34:21 Taylor Shanklin: It’s interesting when I think when I first started out earlier in my career. I was on more of the technical side of implementation and then consulting and really just client services before I moved over and made a pivot into product marketing and then corporate marketing and then leading growth teams and then starting my company and being will be your on demand marketer. And one of the things that I kind of reflected on over the course of my career and in those different types of seats and roles is how, and I really felt this really viscerally when I first moved into my first job in product marketing and then corporate marketing, in house, like marketing leader, and realizing, like, wow, like, marketing is sort of the hardest job, but it’s the job that people think.

0:35:18 Taylor Shanklin: Marketing team, they’re like, fluffy. So, like, there’s this huge misconception and disconnect between marketing is easy and now, like, it’s actually really hard. And the reason why it’s hard is because those expectations are challenges. They’re like, it’s like an uphill battle you are constantly climbing and fighting every single day. Because I feel like the marketing department is often the department that the finger is pointed at first when things aren’t going right where it’s like, well, maybe it’s a sales problem. Maybe we have a product no one wants to buy.

0:35:56 Taylor Shanklin: You know? Like, maybe our customer service is shit. I don’t know. Like, it could be a lot of things, but it’s like marketing. You guys aren’t getting leads and it’s too expensive and it’s taking too long. And it’s just like, why does product get to say, we’re going to have this roadmap and it’s going to take two years to build this, and everyone’s like, okay, but with marketing, like, I turned on an ad a week ago. Why don’t I have 50 new leads?

0:36:21 Taylor Shanklin: Well, no one knows who you are yet.

0:36:24 Adam Kerpelman: Like you were saying, we’re the, we’re the ones with the cleanest signal on something isn’t working or something? Like you said, we’re the ones with the first and cleanest signal on this product sucks. So it’s like, how are you supposed to do your job? Because you don’t want to offend anybody that you know. And so there is a trick for that, that I’ve used, that product departments love me because I go immediately to the product managers and I say, look, I want to put some budget into testing things before you even have to do the fan fiction of coming up with them. Like, let’s run.

0:37:00 Adam Kerpelman: They’re not fake campaigns, but they’re campaigns for features that don’t exist yet. And they’re going to go to landing pages and maybe they’re lead maggots, but I can get you some signal on, like will it actually convert leads to have this feature that, yeah, everyone’s telling you that they want, but that’s not always the cleanest signal, but it’s usually the best signal that product has. And then that a little bit short circuits some like on the product side, but it’s still, marketing is the only department that also has to market itself internally so that everyone understands what you’re doing.

0:37:34 Adam Kerpelman: Like everyone gets what sales does, right? I keep calling you, I keep closing deals. Everybody’s financed. It’s like I’m in the spreadsheets making sure the numbers add up and the CEO makes the decisions. Everybody kind of thinks they know what marketing does, but they don’t really. And so then you have to constantly make sure, like all of your, and like we’ve done, I mean, this is one of, this is one of those things. It’s fun. Now that I’m kind of out of the client and consulting game I can talk about.

0:37:59 Adam Kerpelman: We used to deliberately put prominent executives into our targeting set to make sure they saw the ads we were running because for so many years people would show up and go, you’re running Google Ads, how come I’m not seeing them? And it’s like, well, because you’re not going to buy our product. So you’re on the exclude list. You seeing it would be a waste of money. We realized we needed to flip that and take like the company roster and put it in the retargeting list so that they see them and they’re like, I’ve been seeing your ads, good work.

0:38:27 Adam Kerpelman: But you also have to really show up in the meetings and say like, here are the wins that marketing got this week. We got this stuff out the door. It got this traction, it got whatever. Like, everybody really needs to see that reporting that you maybe think you only need to show to your manager because the whole company ends up again. It helps with the pointing of the finger because it’s like, well, what’s marketing doing to solve this problem? And it’s like, well, all the things we told you about last Friday, even.

0:38:54 Mark Richardson: The attribution thing we were talking about, it’s understanding that, look, our organic programs are outperforming your lists of slack leads. Being able to have this infrastructure to make those decisions, to understand where the goodness is coming from, where the waste is coming from, and where you can throttle down your spend. Sometimes it’s not even in the external materials. It’s understanding internally what we can do better with our money, with our budget, with our content output.

0:39:27 Adam Kerpelman: We had a funny dashboard we used for a little while that was meant to solve. Like, it was meant to sort of answer the, like, what is marketing actually doing? Question. Because they were obsessed with new leads. We were more concerned at that phase of, I don’t know, the year or wherever we were for whatever the situation was. We were more concerned with funnel velocity and trying to push those leads through closing, but they were still stuck on new leads. And so we kept presenting our traditional report, and they’d be like, well, how come leads are down?

0:39:57 Adam Kerpelman: And our answer was, well, because we’re spending more money on touches and influence. And so we put together a dashboard that was made way more to show the number of touches on existing accounts that marketing was responsible for, and that didn’t quite get through there. So then we started talking about the amount of pipeline revenue that we had influenced. And they loved that one, which was really silly because it was always just like we were targeting the entire pipeline. We literally were pulling the contact information for all of the contacts in the pipeline, putting them in, retargeting and making sure that they got touched.

0:40:34 Adam Kerpelman: And so our influence numbers, like, kept going up by 20 million every week. And it was just like, yeah, because we put in some new leads and now we’re touching them and so we’re getting to double over. But it worked in terms of them finally having a sense of the actual impact that we were having inside of the system. It just was always funny to us because we would get to that slide and all the leaders would go, oh, yeah, we love it. And we’re just like, yeah, that’s because we’re doing a simple best practice thing, which is retargeting existing pipeline to make sure they see more of our ads but they don’t understand.

0:41:13 Adam Kerpelman: And so then it’s one of those things that it feels like a hack or something, like we’re cheating, but it really is just an effective way of communicating what we actually do. In a world where they were so lead obsessed, they kept going, how come there’s no new leads in the pipeline? Like, well, because we’re focused on closing the leads we have. How do we articulate that to you and that that’s worth spending money on?

0:41:35 Mark Richardson: And good marketing can take the pressure off of sales, too. That’s what we noticed, I think, at Netwise and D and B was that we were able to more effectively storytell through display and video ads. So that when someone got on the phone with sales, it wasn’t, tell me every last thing about your product. They came in with an understanding of knowing pretty well that what we were going to do was going to help solve their problem. And it was just a matter of how many seats, what’s the cost?

0:42:01 Mark Richardson: Let me test it out. Cool. Oh really? Then our sales director is going, hey, we reduced, you know, it took two calls to get them to sign this deal, or five calls as opposed to ten, you know, two calls as opposed to five. That’s where we really were like, yeah, the machine is working well.

0:42:19 Adam Kerpelman: But then the problem was, how do we tell that story? Because that creates the thing where it’s. It becomes a really difficult human problem to not have that be a fight with sales because sales was showing up at that time and they were going, oh, no, that’s because we’re badass. We are just closing faster because those two calls are so much better. And we had to kind of be like, okay, we need to find a way to punch through that that isn’t just us saying, no, it was us.

0:42:43 Adam Kerpelman: Because once you’re stuck in a fight of just going, no, me, nobody’s getting anywhere in terms of solving the actual, like, what do you do here? Problem that we’re talking about.

0:42:53 Taylor Shanklin: That in my opinion, is one of like the biggest inhibitors to growth within companies is how much B’s goes on between just like marketing and sales fighting over that stuff. And like, marketing wants to help sales. Of course marketing wants to help sales. Like, all we do all day is try to help sales, you know, and it’s just, again, like kind of another misconception, I think that’s like marketing just kind of doing their thing. They don’t listen to us or whatever it is. You hear all sorts of things. But like, marketing wants sales to be happy so bad.

0:43:32 Taylor Shanklin: Like that’s all we, that’s all marketing wants. They’re like this, sales, sales happy.

0:43:36 Adam Kerpelman: It’s tough. Cause it’s like, it’s a little bit almost in that space of like, like you’re in prison, right? And so don’t show fear, right? Like that kind of thing. It’s a really difficult cultural problem because anybody backed into a corner wants to try to find a scapegoat. And so you, you have to hope that you have a leader who is willing to commit to the idea that it will never be. Like I was saying about my students before, where the teams where I’ve seen it work the best are the teams where the second that somebody from sales tries to blame it on marketing, or the second that somebody from marketing tries to blame it on sales, it just gets shut down.

0:44:14 Adam Kerpelman: Like, that’s just not allowed. Right. And you just say, look, that’s not an acceptable reason. If the reason is because sales, figure it out. But, like, I’m not going to listen to that as the leader and let that be a reason because that’s the kernel of what snowballs into departments that hate each other. Like, you can’t ever let it be an acceptable reason. Like, you can’t let a meeting end on. Well, if marketing got us better leads, we’d do better.

0:44:39 Adam Kerpelman: If you, as a manager, then go, okay, well, I’ll talk to marketing. That’s it. It’s too late now you have a problem you have to undo, like, further down the road, because you just created a culture of, it’s okay for that to be the excuse instead of finding a solution where you’re understanding it as a functional relay and you all failed. If this is really, the problem is really here.

0:45:01 Taylor Shanklin: Yeah, it’s that cultural issue that goes back and forth. That, that’s why I think it, like, that’s like, the biggest inhibitor to broke oftentimes within a team, because, like, so much time and effort and energy is being spent on battling each other and not just, like, doing the testing and the production and, like, staying in those lanes of, like, we’re gonna communicate, we’re gonna test, we’re gonna produce, and, like, just, like, focusing on the work as opposed to, like, I don’t know. That’s why I just feel like oftentimes it’s, you get into so much more.

0:45:38 Adam Kerpelman: Politicking or just preciousness around, like, whatever is considered secret sauce. Like, I’ve been in situations where we really actively try to set up the meetings with sales to say, like, well, you’re on the ground talking to the clients. Like, we need to understand the questions and the, like, what questions they have and what topics are coming up and things like that. And it’s a little bit like, if the dynamic of marketing and sales being an opposition has been created, then as a marketer, I can’t even go punch in because sales doesn’t want to talk to me anymore because they’re going to be giving up to the enemy some ground that’ll help me do better and then make them look worse.

0:46:17 Mark Richardson: I think you hit a key word there, Taylor, which was communication. I think we’re in Olympics time. So I’m thinking of the analogy of, like, you know, a medley curbs a swimmer. So the, the medley analogy, I think, holds strong. Like, the first swimmer can’t do the job of, of the anchor. Right. You know, I mean, he’s just got to do his job the best he can, you know, and the anchor’s not going to tell him, man, I could do that better than you. No, you just do your job really well.

0:46:44 Mark Richardson: And if we’re all, we’re all pulling 110%, we’re probably going to do well in the race. But I think understanding that this bit of feedback can help improve messaging at the top of the funnel, even if you’re only hearing it at the, what we considered the bottom of the funnel or the sales conversation, that was something that was key. It was huge for us, you know, being able to understand, like, match rates, for example, customer was like, I don’t like the match rates I’m getting on Facebook with the Zoom info data.

0:47:11 Mark Richardson: How can you guys help that? And then we’re like, oh, cool. Well, we have our lists do x percent better than Zoom info, so we’ll start messaging that in the display ads or the Facebook ads, we can kind of front run that concern. That’s just one example of where radical communication from sales ended up driving better quality leads, because we were able to message those specific pain points in our top and middle funnel materials and made us a stronger team because of it.

0:47:43 Adam Kerpelman: And I particularly love the relay analogy because it gets to the next piece, which is what I always loved with, and it’s the same with track relays. You’re part of a team and you’re working together to do this thing, but there’s also still data to sort of show who did what, because you have splits. And so, yeah, all the stuff you were talking about in terms of the communication is good. But also, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that being in a situation where marketing and sales are at odds is how I learned a lot of the stuff. I learned about how to use data to solve these problems.

0:48:16 Adam Kerpelman: Because coming up, another way to avoid this is also to make sure that everybody has good practice for tracking the conversion data from one step to another and things like that, so that you can really carefully say, okay, after this touch point, this happened. And over x number of thousands of times, this, you know, and so, like, there really does queue even closer to, like, a swimming, you know, relay like I’m familiar with, which is to say, okay, everybody has their job, and it’s slightly different.

0:48:44 Adam Kerpelman: But also the person who went third was considerably slower the times are going to show it. And so then he can say, okay, well, what happened for you, man? You tired, hungover? Like, what was the deal?

0:48:57 Taylor Shanklin: Well, this, I think, you know, this is kind of brings into the conversation here something that I think is a good takeaway and maybe, maybe a follow on conversation to where, like how do you then the right way of internally selling marketing, you know, how do you appropriately report on it? I think that’s one of those things where, and I haven’t cracked that nut either. You know, sometimes you think you get it and then it’s not quite there, you know, so that might be another part of the machine we talk about another day. I think, like kind of like to add on with like these kind of expectations because I do think I want to bring a lot of light to this topic because I do think one, I’ve been someone who’s been in the hot seat often enough to understand that this is like a very real thing. And like, I think something business leaders need to better understand.

0:49:54 Taylor Shanklin: So the person at the top who ultimately has the decision to, you know, and the final say on things, to truly understand the machine that marketing is the depth that it takes to like kind of dive into, to build it, to get it working, to then start seeing results and like how long that can take, you know, to have better expectation setting internally within cultures and then that follow on of like good reporting and like internal dialogue around it. Because I think that’s, that’s part of the thing that gets really unhealthy.

0:50:34 Taylor Shanklin: And marketers oftentimes don’t know what to report on because they’ll spend all this time pulling together all these numbers. But look at this. Yeah, but that one thing is down.

0:50:44 Adam Kerpelman: Or they’re obsessed with some sort of vanity, like I was saying, like, like they’re stuck on new leads at a time when, to go back to what I was saying, if you’re dealing with a b two b cycle, late in the cycle, you’re more concerned with, can I push the ones further along to close deals this year that are already in motion? If I put a new deal in the pipeline in October, it’s just not going to close in three months because it takes nine to twelve months for an enterprise product to close.

0:51:13 Adam Kerpelman: And so when your boss is still focused on new leads in October, they’re focused on the wrong thing. My question is how to help them understand the thinking behind all the stuff that I just kind of rattled off. And it’s the tricky part, but that as marketers, as you move up the chain. It’s a thing to practice and to not just be grumpy at your boss that they don’t understand because it’s your job to help them understand that, hopefully and they’re not so lost in sort of like, yeah, but we need more money. It’s like, well, okay, but then we needed to talk about that in January.

0:51:49 Adam Kerpelman: Nothing, you know, October, like wait till the beginning of Q four.

0:51:54 Mark Richardson: Any good product led growth execution I think comes with setting expectations. In a time banded nature. You’re rolling something out you’ve got to have and again, three months. I like to set a three month time band to build awareness for anything before you put any expectation of RoI, sales volume, etcetera. If you’re launching from scratch, you know, three months at a minimum to just make people aware that the thing exists and then probably another three months to help them figure out what does this do and how can it help me.

0:52:24 Mark Richardson: And then you can start assigning a sales expectation or leads expectation.

0:52:29 Taylor Shanklin: Yeah, I think that’s a good kind of timeframe to think about. I’ll just close it with kind of like, I’ve had this thought before, like when I went into marketing leadership and like kind of like really being on the marketing like executive side of things. Like, I didn’t realize I was also going to like basically be a politician.

0:52:46 Adam Kerpelman: We get to do a whole nother hour just on the change management aspect of this, right? Like the idea that it’s wholly on marketing when you roll out a new like, hey, marketing has decided that we’re an AI company now.

0:52:58 Taylor Shanklin: Well, to close this out, I just want to ask each of you to answer one question for me. Is there something in particular it could be personal or professional that you’re really like excited about right now? Just it’s like super jazzed about doing or something.

0:53:15 Mark Richardson: Coming up, I’m always interested to see what comes out of Dreamforce. To be honest, having attended that conference may or may not be going this year, my current emerging role on the board for in case cards probably won’t take me to Dreamforce might take me to the winter meetings of MLB, but I always like seeing what comes out of these live events and trade shows that tend to happen in the fall. I’m not really a sales guy, but I’m a big in person marketer.

0:53:41 Mark Richardson: I just love being on the floor shaking hands, hearing keynote speeches and mixing it up at the karaoke bar with folks and then always curious to see what people are rolling out at those types of conferences. So yeah, I think that’s seeing what’s next for me on the ground is what I’m most excited about.

0:54:02 Taylor Shanklin: We should totally go to a conference together because I’m the same way. I like to go around, shake hands, go to the parties just like that. That’s how I like, that’s more where my marketing comes alive.

0:54:15 Adam Kerpelman: Mark has consistently been my secret weapon insofar as I like when I’m in house, I’ll bring him in to do demandgen and then say, but also incidentally, he’ll crush it at every conference we send him to. So mine’s a little broader and it kind of goes back to just some of the stuff we were talking about, generative AI and like, what’s happening with all of that stuff is just super exciting to me as sort of like an academic and a technologist. Like, it really is a paradigm shift where the way that we use computers is about to completely change.

0:54:47 Adam Kerpelman: And so it’s really as much as it makes you look at like, oh, who knows what the future holds. That also to me is super exciting because it feels like we’re at a place where the Internet was just invented and we’re still at that phase where it’s like, you know, you got college humor and ebalm’s world or whatever, but we never saw YouTube or Facebook coming down the pipe. No idea what’s going to get built now that these sort of intermediate tools that are generative AI models exist and what it’s going to mean for all kinds of, whether it’s marketing customization or not needing to worry about multilingual.

0:55:24 Adam Kerpelman: I think about just from a marketing standpoint, if this is a translation layer that really is that good at translating than the idea of coming in as a marketer and saying, well, one easy win is that we could translate the whole site into Spanish. That’s just click of a button now, right? It’s going to be built into the web that everything is in every language. Like that’s such an exciting connection of community and all that sort of stuff that like, you know, what’s, what’s going to happen to the world because of it is super, super exciting.

0:55:53 Taylor Shanklin: It’ll, it’ll be interesting. Well, we’ll keep the conversation going and we’ll find that conference mark and we will go to it and we will do a lot of karaoke and we will have a lot of fun pictures from that. Well, hey guys, it’s been a lot of fun talking to you. We’ll post links to marketing machine and how to get in touch with you in our show notes. And as always, I hope that if you were listening today, you found something in here helpful and useful.

0:56:22 Taylor Shanklin: Whether you are an executive, he needs to better understand expectations around marketing and the marketing machine, or you are a marketer who is kind of fighting those daily battles that we talked about. We’re here for you if you want to talk, if you want to chat, and hopefully this gave a little bit of insight into some trends in AI and marketing and just the overall world that is the marketing machine.

0:56:48 Taylor Shanklin: Well, hey there. That was fun. I love how much mind blowing and mind opening shizzle our guests bring to us with every episode. We hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as we did. Make sure you hit that subscribe button on your favorite podcast player so that you don’t miss a beat of the Talking Shizzle podcast. And if you’re listening on Apple, be sure to let us know what you thought and leave us a review.

0:57:15 Taylor Shanklin: We’d love to hear from our listeners so that we can bring you all the a good, juicy business growth shizzle that you would like to hear about. Get in touch with us and follow along@creativeshizzle.com. or email us@podcastreativeshizzle.com dot until next time, keep making your shizzle happen.