Kevin Kerner: 0:00Hey there, this is Kevin Kerner, host of Tech Marketing Rewired. Ever wonder where marketing tech is really headed? I sat down with Scott Brinker last week arguably one of the most influential voices in MarTech to talk about why AI might break all of our tech stacks, how composability could change everything and why the future of marketing might be built by non-marketers. At one point, scott said we're not just changing tools, we're changing how marketers think about what's possible. If you're interested in the future of MarTech from Scott's perspective and really who isn't this is really a must watch. So I hope you find it useful. Let's dive in. This is Tech Marketing Rewired. We're in. Hi Scott, how are you doing?Scott Brinker: 0:43

Hi, great to be here with you.

Kevin Kerner: 0:48

Yeah, I'm so excited to have you. I know we're going to talk a lot about composability and the Martech stack and all the geeky questions that I have in my mind to get into that. I know we'll both like. I know you really well, but I wonder if you'd do just a quick introduction. How did you get to where you are today and what are you doing today?

Scott Brinker: 1:09

Sure. So the short version is yeah, I started out life as an engineer and then sort of as a software entrepreneur, got very fascinated with marketing because it turns out if you build it they don't necessarily come and then actually ended up being more in the direction of an entrepreneur, building originally a web services agency that was bringing technology to marketing departments, agency that was bringing technology to marketing departments. And that's where I got really fascinated by this collision between the world of marketing and the world of IT and software. That you know back a couple decades. If you'd gone to your high school guidance counselor, they would have like put these professions on opposite ends of the spectrum and obviously in the world we live in today, that just becomes so deeply entangled. And obviously in the world we live in today, that just becomes so deeply entangled.

Scott Brinker: 1:51

And so over the years I built software companies, smart tech companies, myself. After I sold the last one I built, I actually joined a company called HubSpot to help build their ecosystem of technology partners, because I got very committed to the vision of how do you get all these different tools to integrate better together? And then, in parallel to that, yeah, for now about 17 years I've been writing a blog and doing other sort of speaking and writing around just this concept of marketing technology, some of which is the technology, but frankly, actually some of the more interesting topics to me are the people and the organization and the process. And how do you run a modern marketing team with technology so deeply entangled.

Kevin Kerner: 2:29

I didn't know you had that background. That's really wild and we're a HubSpot customer and we also work in HubSpot, so I love it and it is very integrated. We're going to talk a little bit about the integration of some of this tech and how integrated it's getting, how the ease of integration, and HubSpot does a great job with that. I love it. It's not a plug, it's like literally, I love how easy it gets. You know you've been doing this for a long time. What do you think the most fundamental shift is in the MarTech landscape that's happening right now? Maybe the last 12 months, and I know there's, of course, AIs in that but I'd love to crystallize, like what, what's the biggest shift right now?

Scott Brinker: 3:08

Well, I'll answer that two ways. One is like let's for a moment take AI off the table, because the answer is, of course, ai. But if we weren't talking about AI, if AI wasn't sucking all the oxygen out of the room, I think the most interesting thing we'd be talking about in MarTech is this shift towards true universal data layers inside a lot of companies. You know, again, going back a few years in Maritech, every Maritech application had its own database and the whole focus on integration was, you know, throwing pieces of data from one database to another. This is what we saw the rise of things like CBPs, you know, to help facilitate.

Scott Brinker: 3:41

But over the past five years there's been this real shift in adoption around cloud data warehouses lake houses, lakes, take your pick.

Scott Brinker: 3:50

You know that really almost every application, asymptotically, is now starting to like, send data down into that universal data layer and is increasingly able to pull data out of that universal data layer. And this is a huge unlock in being able to get data to flow more freely, not just across marketing, frankly, across the whole org. But it's such an unlock for marketers because there was all this data. Before that they just never even were able to get access to it, certainly couldn't get access to it easily. And so I think that trend is, you know, continuing on. And that's where it then kind of intersects with, of course, the big trend of AI, because, for all the amazing and wonderful things that AI is starting to make possible, almost all of them depend on being able to feed the right data, good data, you know, at the right point in time in your tech stack. And so these two trends of like yeah, improvement of our data infrastructure, combined with now some of the really cool possibilities that AI unlocks, it's kind of a perfect storm.

Kevin Kerner: 4:54

I've never actually thought about it that way. You're right. It's really the connection between the databases and how easy that's become. And then you layer on intelligence on top of that AI, and it can make use of all those connections. It can even make the connections happen faster or easier. It's really amazing.

Kevin Kerner: 5:10

I think I'm seeing a couple trends from friends in the industry. Now we work primarily on the tech industry. It's either more companies consolidating around a few big platforms and those platforms have certainly the connectors built in and then there's the other probably and I have a unique perspective because I work with big companies we are a company, my own company there's this decoupling that's happening of a lot of the big software, where I'm finding these little applications that do little things but very valuable things. They might or might not plug into another ecosystem, and I tend to find two camps we're going to consolidate, tend to find two camps we're going to consolidate, got to find a way to get rid of all these little things and get a big thing. Or it's like wow, look at all this cool stuff I can plug together. What do you think's driving those competing forces? And I'm just curious of your thoughts around those two dimensions.

Scott Brinker: 6:00

Yeah, no, it's a great question and the question I think is on everybody's mind and there's not. I mean, one of the things I like about it is there's not necessarily a right answer universally. It really it depends, like, what are you trying to get out of? I mean, the reason people generally look to do consolidation is for a combination of like listen, we want this to be simpler to use. You know, we find like okay, there's too many different interfaces, too many different things people are trying to learn. So if we can simplify the number of things that people have to learn, great, they'll get more value out of that. They'll utilize it.

Scott Brinker: 6:34

There's certainly this integration question of like hey, listen, it's one thing to in theory have a lot of highly specialized, best in breed tools, but if they don't work well together you're not really able to unlock the full value of that. And then there's even just sort of the procurement level of like okay, how many vendors do you manage? Who do you price negotiate with? Although you have to be a little bit careful there, because consolidation, particularly on the price side, that cuts both ways. Yes, you can certainly look at how you save money by consolidating to a smaller number of vendors. But there is a flip side of this is, if you become just far too dependent on any one vendor, yeah, the price leverage actually shifts to the other direction, and so I actually think it's in a lot of marketers' best interest, a lot of IT organizations' best interest, to make sure the way they design their tech stack is that they're always maintaining some optionality so that you always have that leverage, whether it's because you want to be able to adopt something new that you weren't able to anticipate, or when it comes time to have a vendor negotiation. You're like, you know, just so you know we have options, so make sure you're giving us the good deal, anyways. But so that's sort of like where you know we have options, so make sure you're giving us the good deal, anyways.

Scott Brinker: 7:47

But so that's sort of like where you know I think people think of for consolidation, as far as more of the best of the breed. It's just the fact that there's so many things emerging so quickly, so many new capabilities. You know we're still seeing like new channels and new tactics and marketing, and there's just too many things changing for any one vendor to be able to keep up with all of that, and so different marketers for, like different things they're wanting to do, it can be highly advantageous for them to pick a particular point solution that lets them experiment with something you know, maybe like accelerate something in a way that their competitors aren't doing. And this is a balance, you know you want to not have like the Wild West of just a million undisconnected tools. But I think if you have a phrase I like is a rationalized tech stack where you have, you know, generally like these core platforms, but they're open ecosystem, and then you have the ability to bring in these specialist tools when they're useful to you. You can kind of have the best of both worlds.

Kevin Kerner: 8:44

Yeah, I totally agree, I was. The other thing is changing real fast. I mentioned I had Jacob Bank from Relay on talked to him earlier this week and I asked him about agents and the improvement in agent, the agent function and what's happened over the last, you know, let's say, 12 months, and he says he can, because of course he's writing a bunch of prompts every day inside the his agents and he can see, almost on a week-by-week basis, the models getting better, Like what is returned from the AI is actually improving on a week-to-week basis. I don't want to say day-by-day, but it's just incredible. So you think about all those platforms connected ecosystem they have their own AI sometime inside them. Ecosystem they have their own AI sometime inside them. And then you have this idea of agents that are either in the platform or intermediary in between the platforms and I think it's fascinating that all of those things are evolving at the same time. You know they're all beginning to evolve all together, so it's a really incredible environment.

Scott Brinker: 9:42

Yeah, well, I mean, this is exactly why you have to lean into open ecosystems. You know people ask me like OK, what are a couple of things that you know they should ask vendors. You know my top two questions are always like OK for the data, can I get any of the data I want into it and can I get any of the data I want out of it? Because we live in a world here where it's just not rational anymore to say, like a vendor can black box and hold your data hostage. You have to be able to have access to it. And then the next layer up is you know, from an integration perspective, how much. You know how much of the capability is accessible by APIs.

Scott Brinker: 10:18

Because it's exactly to this thing of what you're saying here with these AI agents are like the perfect example. Listen, I may want to use an AI agent that's built into that tool and if that does what I need, fantastic. But I might also want to use a third party, independent agent that does something different. Heck, we're probably not far away from more and more people just wanting to build their own agents, you know, really hyper tailored to their business, and if your tech stack doesn't give you the ability to give you access to the data or API services to empower what those agents can do. Yeah, you start to feel like you're really boxed in and, in a world where things are changing week by week, the last thing you want is to be boxed in.

Kevin Kerner: 10:57

Yeah, it's never, never been like this before. It's crazy. That's it brings up. The point in my mind is like do you see that all these, that all these tech companies are going to have to give access, universal access or better access inside the platform? Are you seeing any platforms that are like I don't know, I got my own AI here. I don't know if I want to give others type of tools access into my data because it makes my tool less relevant, or is that happening, or will that happen, and there's eventually just the consumer wins in that case.

Scott Brinker: 11:27

Yeah, I think this is one of the things where I mean it's it's, it's the law of economics of this. It makes absolute sense why vendors, given their desires, would be like no, no, no, it's all in our system, we control it all. You can't get out of ours, like you know, and it's not for any evil reason. It's just like hey, no, no, it's all in our system, we control it all, you can't get out of ours and it's not for any evil reason. It's just like hey, the business models the more lock-in we have, the better. It's the exact opposite, obviously, for the buyers, the consumers, the customers who are using this stuff, is optionality. Particularly in an environment of just such rapid and unpredictable change, optionality is just an incredible asset, and I think this is one of the cases. People often complain about the size of the MarTech landscape. Like you've got literally thousands and thousands of vendors, and I get it, it's too much. Like I can't keep track of it all you can't even fit it now on the.

Kevin Kerner: 12:19

MarTech architecture thing you've been doing for so long.

Scott Brinker: 12:22

It's just crazy. But one advantage of that is there is a lot of competition among MarTech users, and that is actually a good thing for the buyers of this, because you know what it basically comes down to is, even though the major not even just the major MarTech platforms, if they could, they would do a lot more lock-in, but in an environment where there's so much competition and the buyers are demanding the ability to have optionality and integration, it's just not an option, because if you're not going to open up your platform, the buyer's going to choose a competitor. So anyway, that's my take on it.

Kevin Kerner: 13:00

Yeah, I want to sort of adjacent topic I want to get to is this idea of yeah, I saw something you'd posted about the citizen led software. You had this graph that showed where we are today with production ready software from companies all the way down to like, everyone building everything all at the same time. That is super cool idea. We use glide a bunch, which is the no code. That is awesome. We use it for we built a whole um company dashboard really for customers and for us all in glide, and literally what it would have taken in react or angular or something five years ago, it would have taken hundreds of thousands of dollars and it took, you know, we built, we had a prototype up in you know, maybe a couple weeks for a few hundred dollars. It's just amazing. So and it's, you know, it's got all the apis and such great stuff. I wonder, I wonder, if you could talk a bit about that graph, that transition you see coming, and why you see it's coming all the way down to the citizen led.

Scott Brinker: 13:56

I think that's a really cool idea yeah, and actually even, I think, goes further than the citizen led, because for a while we talked about citizen developers, where it's okay, it's a power user, an ops person, a business, you know, sort-minded, but they're a business person and that they could develop, using no-code tools, their own little apps or automations or whatnot. And that's what you know. Gartner, I think, was the one who coined the phrase. Oh, that's citizen development. What's really wild now is with some of these AI products like just take ChatGPT, because this is a real example, I'd used the other week products Like just take ChatGPT, because this is a real example, I'd used the other week.

Scott Brinker: 14:33

You can go in as just a marketer and say hey, chatgpt, could you go to the stock market data and I want to like look at, you know, tech companies versus non-tech companies for the past 20 years and put together a chart for me. You just type that in a natural language. It turns around for a bit and comes back and you've got a beautiful graph that shows you exactly that. Now, if you actually click on the little details thing of how ChatGPT did that, it opens up. It turns out it wrote a Python program at your request, you know, pulled that data together and then, like you know, you called it, like you know, charting library to, you know render it, and so what's wild about this is people making these requests. You know, these AI assistants and agents. They're writing software without even being aware that they're writing software. And that's sort of why, when I think about that long tail, I think like, ok, at that point in time, I mean you can't even measure it. It's you know, we're not talking about millions of apps, we're talking billions, trillions of apps. It's you know, we're not talking about millions of apps, we're talking billions, trillions of apps. And at some level, yeah, it just even stops being a thing to think about these things as apps. It's more of like, oh yeah, just doing my bidding on demand. It's kind of wild.

Scott Brinker: 15:41

But, that being said, I will say like I don't think this is the end of commercial software. You know, because, let's face it, like when you look at a lot of these major platforms and what they do, there's a lot there. It's not just database with a little bit of UI. I mean the amount of sort of like business logic and rules and the way in which these things have been like carefully constructed that allow you to have like stable foundations to your tech stack. That's not something that everybody wants to be creating from scratch. It's not just not enough comparative advantage in doing that, you know.

Scott Brinker: 16:11

So I think the world we're moving into is one where, yeah, the tech stack is still going to have these like major products and platforms at the center. But if they're all open and they all give you that ability to like tap into their power through APIs or open data exchange, then you can imagine using more and more of these AI tools to be able to build much more custom workflows or employee experiences or customer experiences. On top of that and I think this is something where I mean every business wants to run things their own way. It's just hey, you know, if you didn't have like an army of software developers, you know whole budget like you kind of had to say like, well, we'll just take the software from the vendor as is and we will adapt to the software rather than the software adapting to you.

Scott Brinker: 17:00

And this is what excites me about some of this AI is I think it's going to empower a lot more businesses to say like, okay, great, we've got your software as the starting point, but now we're going to manipulate how we actually work with it, you know, to really tailor to our vision of how our business would operate or our vision of how we should deliver our customer experience.

Kevin Kerner: 17:19

Yeah, you think it becomes a world of micro apps. You know just apps everywhere doing all kinds of crazy stuff.

Kevin Kerner: 17:25

As far as the eye can see, yes, I did a little test the other day using Claude, and I was trying to get some ideas for an engagement dashboard and it built this really cool dashboard. It wasn't really usable but I watched it right at the Python as it was doing it and it had errors in it, but it's just amazing that you can do that now. Play that out another year, couple years. It's just incredible. I wish the I don't know about you, but I wish the big platforms Perplexity, claude, chatgpt made it easier for you to use their apps inside of other things. You can I mean you can, but as a layman, like, let's say, you're just a business person and you wanted to dig into, you know, google, your google stack or something else one of them just came out with is it mcp or at some universal?

Kevin Kerner: 18:15

robic yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah, so that's a that. I don't know much about that, but it sounded like a the days of email when we had separate email platforms, you know, cc mail and pegasus Mail and all the other mails.

Scott Brinker: 18:30

Lotus 1, 2, 3. Or whatever that thing was. Scott was on Lotus and I was on CC Mail.

Kevin Kerner: 18:37

I couldn't get you an email. It was terrible, terrible user experience. But I wonder if more of that's going to happen with the big players.

Scott Brinker: 18:45

Yeah, well, I think that is definitely Anthropix's vision of the MCP. The Model Context Protocol is could there just be a standard of how these things interface, whether it's other databases or other services? And kind of everyone's been like, yeah, that's a really good idea. And so you're actually seeing pretty rapid adoption of MCP. You know, and again, like all this stuff is early. And again, like all this stuff is early.

Scott Brinker: 19:07

But you know, one of the funny things about this is because sometimes people still accurately say like, hey, there's how much of this is hype? And sure, there's absolutely a lot of hype. I mean, the Garga hype curve is alive and well. But here's the difference is it used to be years ago. The hype would have a certain trajectory and then over time the reality would catch up. But the distance between the two was usually measured in years and like as you were saying earlier here, like now it's at a place like, yeah, the hype definitely gets ahead of the reality. But the time it takes for the reality to close that gap, it's not years anymore, it's months. In some cases it's like weeks. And so I both, on one hand, can continue to maintain a skeptical mindset of the hype when I first hear it, but I am very reluctant to say like, yeah, that's not going to be possible in the next year because two months later, well, maybe.

Kevin Kerner: 20:00

I keep getting slapped down every time I say no, that's not going to happen. Then I see it happen and then I say no, that couldn't possibly happen. Boom, it happens. It's unbelievable. Yeah, I think the MCP thing is really interesting and I wonder if the other platform providers, the big guys, will either adopt or create their own or whatever. It's going to be an interesting war to see play out. On another topic of sort of this consolidation, you introduced this idea of a system of context. I think it was system of context right and I was really amazed by that. People have to look at it, or maybe I can link to it. That thought that you have a surrounding system and subsystems between. Can you talk a little? Can you describe that a bit?

Scott Brinker: 20:45

Yeah Well, I mean, part of what was in my head here is like for a long time in MarTech stacks, we'd sort of divided things into systems of record and systems of engagement, you know. And what's been interesting is at the data layer you start like getting this. You know the cloud data warehouse phenomenon, the universal data layer is. It is even like less of saying one particular thing is a system of record, you know, but some things help, like I start to call them more systems of truth. Maybe that's too philosophical of a word, but you know this idea that the data is actually flowing everywhere and you just have a question of like, ok, for different kinds of data, what technology is sort of being the arbiter of what the truth is or isn't in that or isn't in that. But then on the engagement level too, I mean that term came around in the days when people were thinking like, yeah, well, we'll have, you know, maybe a marketing automation system, maybe a you know web, you know DXP platform, you know, and so you could sort of count.

Scott Brinker: 21:40

On one hand, what you said were the systems of engagement. But now, with all this long tail or hyper tail of you know agents and you know, or a hyper tale of you know agents and you know custom software and all this Boy, you're getting to this place where, like, different software is truly being adapted much more to the specific context in which a particular employee is working or which a particular customer is having an engagement. And so that's where I started to suggest, like, maybe we shouldn't be thinking about systems of engagement so much as like, yeah, systems of context and they're exploding everywhere. About systems of engagement so much is like, yeah, systems of context and they're exploding everywhere. But, that being said, you know we were talking earlier.

Scott Brinker: 22:14

I don't believe that everything is just going to be completely custom, you know, for every single business. I think it's going to be this interplay, but in this world of what our systems of context are built on is, you will have a set of core platforms that actually provide really valuable functions for you know, like your core, you know CRM management, your you know core digital asset management. You know things like, again, you don't want to like, reinvent all this, you know from scratch. On that, yeah, you'll have all these more and more tailored experiences for employees and customers, and each one becomes like, oh, what's the context for that particular person at that particular time?

Kevin Kerner: 22:50

That's such a cool thought. And in between all those systems of context is something, something will they'll either talk together or there'll be something in between that will help them talk together. Do you have a, do you have an idea of what? Will there be a master system above all those systems of context running, or is there there any light towards someone winning that you know, broader AI system that just talks to all these things?

Scott Brinker: 23:16

Yes, I think you put your finger on what, to me, is the quintessential battle of the moment is okay, who is the conductor? We've got all these things that are operating inside our environment. Who is the conductor? And right now there is not a singular conductor. You have multiple systems that are conducting different parts of this and, if I'm being honest, I think that's likely to be the case for a of like oh, this one's orchestrating this piece of our world, oh, this one's orchestrating this other piece. You know, I do think, things like MCP. You know, if we start to see more standards about how to integrate these things, and there is an emerging category of software that's almost being designed from the ground up to be orchestration.

Scott Brinker: 24:07

You know, platforms in this environment, but I think it's just way too early to predict that there's a winner, and what's wild is well, I think we would all want there to be a winner, like if you could just magically say yes, I would like one system that is the total orchestrator and conductor for this. I'm not sure if that's actually going to emerge anytime soon, and it's almost like you know, these sort of was that like the nash equilibrium game theory is yeah, it's not necessarily a winner takes. All it's some interplay between, yeah, multiple conductors, that, yeah, because this is we'll have to, you know, sort of manage. You know which one they're turning to in which particular context, but I don't know. Yeah, you start trying to predict how this is going to look a few years from now.

Kevin Kerner: 24:52

It's just, it's just hard to change so much I honestly that's right we will have to play this back in a year and see all this back in a year, if we're even able to do this in a year, okay. So I have a really good friend he's a cmo who I talked to late last week and they were trying to make sense of all this. What do you do if you're a business leader that is trying to understand the tools that they have and how they can benefit from some of these newer technologies, let alone try to figure out do you have the right stuff? How do you react to this stuff? If you're, let's say, a marketing leader and you're looking at your stack going, so you have the right stuff here?

Scott Brinker: 25:31

yeah, it's a great question. Um, probably not a 30 second answer to that. I will say a few things like one is, there are these products out there called sass management platforms and they plug them into your sack and basically they're through a combination of like single sign-ons or like your finance system. They, they actually will map all of the different subscriptions and all the different SaaS things you have and like give you an ability to sort of like both view that and manage that collectively, which every time I've seen people plug this in, it's awesome. Like yeah, you'll ask people like hey, how many things do you have in your sack? And they'll be like I don't know. You know they'll plug it on platforms. I comes back with like 300. Wait, god.

Kevin Kerner: 26:12

And then you start looking at the list. It's like my checking account. I go, oh God, what am I? Are my Apple subscriptions? I'm like what? How did it?

Scott Brinker: 26:21

which kid. It's bizarre, like when you actually start to look at all the things you subscribe to. There's like things we don't even really think of as SaaS but they kind of are. Like how many of your employees are using Coursera for training? I mean, at the end of the day, it's an LMS SaaS app Anyway. So that's one place to start is actually make sure you're getting a complete view of what's in your stack today.

Scott Brinker: 26:43

I think the other thing is so there's maybe two things here. One is sort of the balance between an investment in what you currently have and what you're doing versus how much time and resourcing should you be allocating to experimenting and learning on the frontier? And this is one of these things where I'd say it's the 80-20 rule, where for you it might be 90-10 or whatnot might be 70-30. It's probably not 50-50, where, right, I mean, still, the vast majority of the time really needs to go into the current operations. I mean, marketing is a really complex machine right now and marketers just don't have the luxury of you know, setting all that aside and like hey, let's envision an entirely different tech stack and operating system. You know, you have to be adjusting the plane a bit while it's in the air operating system. You know you have to be adjusting the plane a bit while it's in the air, but you could also make the mistake in the other direction of just not giving people inside your team enough space to start to experiment and learn, even if you're going to sandbox some of these things. You know. In fact, you should sandbox some of these things and make sure you have guard rails. But there is so much capability that is advancing so quickly. If you aren't carving out some time and resourcing and, frankly, permission for people to be able to go and do this, you know you really risk losing the sort of skill and capability development you know that needs to happen.

Scott Brinker: 28:09

And then the last thing I would say about this from your current tech stack is to me, the most important thing is design for change. We were chatting earlier about this too. It's like if you aren't leaning into the insistence of open platforms and anytime you're evaluating a vendor or something to change in your tech stack, that the openness of both a data layer and an API layer if they aren't near the top of your list, yes, price matters. Yes, you know the functionality of what you have. I mean, there's a bunch of things that matter, but, boy, the sort of openness you know at the data and API level, it's got to be there in that first class citizen set of things you're looking for, because that is what gives you that optionality. Then, because that is what gives you that optionality, then, as these new things start to emerge and new capabilities emerge, your ability to plug them in and take advantage of them like increases by an order of magnitude.

Kevin Kerner: 29:01

Yeah, totally agree. Besides, something really I thought was great is the also. That's the sandbox approach democratization to some degree of your team and giving them the ability to go test. Because if you're a, if you're a CMO, looking at this stuff your head would explode because you're not, you can't, it's just hard to take it all in. But if you distribute some of that creativity and experimentation to your team and you and you start to begin people to hire people that maybe know a little bit more about technology and how to how to really utilize technology on the marketing function, you can get more done through more people that are creative, willing to experiment. Sandboxing is the right thing to do because you don't want people going crazy, but it seems like the makeup of the type of person that is going to be required to experiment and select tools it's just going to be different than it is today. You're just going to have to have that technical curiosity, I guess.

Scott Brinker: 29:55

I think you're right that it's the curiosity, almost that's the key thing. Like, up until very recently, the technical skill required was important too, like if you didn't really sort of understand programming. If, like, boy, if you were presented with a piece of JavaScript, would you freak out, you know, it was important just because that was the way in which you would experiment and pull these things together. But now, with these tools again, like things like the code itself, they really are very quickly fading into the background. But the difference is, like, is someone still willing to like, have the curiosity of, hey, can I get this to do this thing here? And can I like, oh, what if I took this other thing over here and connected it? You know, and that's, that's a new skill. You know, we've just never even had these capabilities.

Scott Brinker: 30:40

You had to write that before right when they went to college, I'm like, oh yeah, this is how you'll be running marketing, you know. So it is a mindset, I think, as much as anything else else.

Kevin Kerner: 30:49

Okay, so I want to do something here real quick before I let you go. I'm calling this. This is the only second time I've done it, so I have not tested it, but one other time this is going to be called AI roulette, so we're live here, so what?

Scott Brinker: 31:01

I did, was I loaded I loaded a prompt and a perplexity.

Kevin Kerner: 31:04

I told it. I have you on the podcast. Today we're talking a bit about composability in the MarTech stack. I wanted to ask a provocative and unexpected question and I loaded in your latest posts, your LinkedIn profile with all your recent posts and the email that we had gone back and forth on. So I'm going to hit send here and see what happens. Drumroll, here we go Two seconds. It didn't take very long. Okay, here we go. I'm going to read it live. I'm going to preview it. Preview Given the rise of generative AI and its potential to flood MarTech with low quality automated content, do you think composability could? Couple of years ago, where I was talking about the second order effects of some of this AI and content generation is a perfect example, it's like oh there's this trigger, we can now use these tools to generate content.

Scott Brinker: 32:06

What's the first order effect? Well, the first order effect is there's going to be a hell of a lot more content. I mean like, yeah, just, you know, anyone can make content super easy, and now we're getting to a point where it can happen on autopilot, okay. Well, what is the second order effect of that? You know that sort of content is basically worthless. It's, like you know, because the actual attention of your audience and the ability to like win on a differentiation component or to build a reputation like you're just not going to do it through that channel, and so I think this is something where you just have to look at an entirely different way to engage with your audience. Now, what's interesting is, well, on one hand, you're thinking of content marketers being unleashed with tools, these thermonuclear content, you know, content generation tools that you know just flood everything. On the other side of the equation, one of the hottest things out there in marketing right now, or just sort of in the, you know, webosphere in general, is the world of influencers and creators Is these voices that are unique, voices that stand out. They engage audiences.

Scott Brinker: 33:12

I was talking to someone the other day who was telling me like, oh, you know, I mean, the problem is people only have, you know, the attention of goldfish, you know. So how do you do marketing in that? I'm like, well, okay, here's the counter to that. You know, when you have, you know, shows like I don't know like Joe Rogan's like podcast that I think goes on for hours at a time, you at a time, you know like, well, he has a huge audience of people who seem more than willing to like give him, like multiple hours of his attention.

Scott Brinker: 33:37

You know, and you see this throughout a variety of these different creators, and I think, if I am a marketer trying to think about like, okay, how do I stand out in a world of theoretically infinite content? It's got to be this thing around the personality, the differentiation, like leaning into this sort of like creator ethos. You know, whether it's actually collaborating with creators, which is certainly one option, or even if you're going to do some of this internally, to think like, okay, maybe it's just, instead of having this faceless, voiceless, you know, content we churn out like who are some of the voices inside our company that could be really engaging personalities and do we actually like use them more as a mechanism to, like create an audience and engage with people in a way that they're not going to get from the generic content.

Scott Brinker: 34:26

I don't know, there's probably a dozen other different strategies you can think through, but I think it's a great question everyone should be asking.

Kevin Kerner: 34:32

Yeah Well, we'll credit perplexity with the best question in this entire podcast.

Scott Brinker: 34:35

I don't know about that, you've got all it is, don't you?

Kevin Kerner: 34:42

I think the answer is dead on. I mean, I think if there's going to be a rise in product-led market, more product-led personality marketing, really like, hey, I've created this thing, look how cool it is, let me show you how to use it. Here's my opinion around the space. I see it working with all the people I follow. I follow them because they're interesting and it's great and I'm geeking out about this stuff. I follow that a lot more than I would going to a website or having someone send me a white paper or whatever.

Kevin Kerner: 35:12

I have this theory, scott, about the. You know, I was here before the internet started and actually before email started. Now and now we got AI and I think that AI could end the internet because there'll be so much stuff out there. You know it's now. We can't use email, we can't use LinkedIn, we can't use any of the other things. We're just going to be able to meet face-to-face like this. That will be the world. So I will have seen the rise of the internet all the way down to just personal meetings like this.

Scott Brinker: 35:41

Although you know now the thing that will like yeah, you know, it's the spin on, that is boy. Some of these AI avatars are getting so good You're asking yourself is this the real Scott Brinker?

Kevin Kerner: 35:51

This is really Scott. I was good. You're asking yourself is this the real scott?

Scott Brinker: 35:55

brinker, this is really scott. I was wondering how you could do this. I thought you had a meeting to actually like validate.

Kevin Kerner: 36:00

Uh this, it's time ahead I am super glad that we reconnected and it's been fascinating to talk to you. Of course, I could talk to you a lot longer, but I know you're. You're a busy guy. I know you have a bunch of stuff coming out. I know you have this. Uh, I think you have some composability research coming out, which is awesome. You've got the MarTech online thing happening. I want you to be. I want people to know how they can get more of this stuff from you. Where would they go?

Scott Brinker: 36:20

Well, I guess probably the best place would be chief MarTechcom, and that's chief MarTech without the H at the end. Long story on that, probably not a good story, but anyways, chief MarTech just ends in. You know the Ccom and I'll post everything there. But yeah, feel free to, like you know, reach out on LinkedIn as well too.

Kevin Kerner: 36:41

I'm SJ Brinker okay, awesome Scott, this has been great. Thank you so much. It's really great to talk to you and I appreciate it and good luck. We'll talk in a year and compare notes.

Scott Brinker: 36:53

Thank you, Kevin. Thank you so much for having me.

Kevin Kerner: 36:56

Okay, we'll see you.