Changes to how you'll spend a marketing budget

AI adoption is upending marketing budgets. Katrina Wong, Chief Marketing Officer at New Relic, brings 20+ years leading marketing and go-to-market strategy across enterprise tech companies including Twilio Segment, Hired, Zuora, Salesforce, and SAP. She discusses experimenting with OpenAI's ChatGPT app program despite unproven ROI, treating emerging AI platforms as a budget hypothesis rather than a guaranteed channel, and rethinking SEM investment as LLMs become a default search interface. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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  From advertising to software as a service to data, across all of our programs and clients, we've seen a 55 to 65% open rate.

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  Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs better than TV advertising.

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  Typical life span of an article is about 24 to 36 hours.

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  If we're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call to action, then it's just a matter of timing.

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  Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world-class marketers that use technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's the host of the Martech Podcast, Benjamin Shapiro.

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  If platforms like OpenAI focus on advertising for monetization, what do you think's going to change about your spend in marketing budget?

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  I do agree that we will move in that direction over time and that from what I can see now, that LLMs will be perhaps the default for how we find answers. There's been a lot of adoption for both business, business users, the everyday person, you know, technical, team members, et cetera. So I do think traditional channels, maybe it is the death of the SEM as we know it. So with my team, I've encouraged the team as like, look, you know, forget the ROI just quite yet, let's take a small piece of our budget, experiment.

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  So we are part of OpenAI's like beta chat GPT app program right now. It's not quite yielding the results in the same way yet as some of the other channels, but you're always going to have to invest in, you know, your hypothesis of where the market's going to go.

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  Yeah, I think there's always going to be a place for putting your message in digital channels in front of people in exchange for your dollars. Paid advertising is not going away.

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  I agree.

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  And I think that's always going to be a consumer-facing product solution. What I think is interesting about what's happening now is we're seeing more usage of AI, right? People are developing their own agents. And I think of this kind of like Claude's mindset versus GPTs, and maybe that's not fair, but you know, I am using Claude to develop my agents. I know there's Codex, you can do the same thing. I'm never going to see the advertisements because I'm not the one going to the websites. But my parents, who are going to go to Google or maybe even AOL at this point, who knows, you know, are still going to be exposed to the advertising. So I think it depends on the sort of surface that you're interacting in.

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  You will still be able to get ads or you'll still be able to serve ads to people. But that, that, that sort of value exchange and who and when and where is dramatically going to shift.

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  Yeah. I mean, it kind of happened with television to streaming to, I no longer see ads, but then when I watch the Super Bowl or, or the World Cup, I was like, oh wait, this is what commercials look like and I quite enjoy them. So I know, we'll see what happens.

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  It's fun in the Super Bowl. It's annoying when it's every television show you watch being the same ad over and over again.

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  Yes, fewer ads, fewer ads.

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  It's funny, I take my kids on vacation and if they don't have Netflix on the like hotel TV, they're like, Dad, what's with all the ads? It's the same thing over and over again. I'm like, welcome to the 90s, my friend. This is what it was like for me too.

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  The best decade, the best decade.

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  All right, that wraps up this episode of the Martech Podcast. Thanks to Katrina Wong, the Chief Marketing Officer at New Relic. If you'd liked it, contact Katrina. You can find a link to her LinkedIn profile in our show notes or on martechpod.com, or you can visit her company's website, which is newrelic.com. If you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app or on YouTube and we'll be back in your podcast feed next week. All right, that's it for today, but until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy.

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  Thanks for listening to the Martech Podcast, an I Hear Everything production. Looking to launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand? Then visit iHereEverything.com.