The Messaging Pain of 3,000+ Marketing AI Tools
Lawsuits can be great marketing
Hello Gobbledeers,
How’s it going? I hope you’ve been enjoying the deluge of content we’ve been publishing between the podcast and the messaging breakdown. It’s been fun branching out a bit from the newsletter.
Speaking of which:
Have you been thinking to yourself: We really need to change our homepage because nobody understands what we do and how we’re different from our competitors?
If so, I’m holding a session I’m calling “Everything You Need to Transform Your Homepage Messaging (in 45 minutes”.) It’s not a webinar - it’ll be interactive (ie, you can ask questions). I’ll walk through the structure of how you can hold your own messaging workshop at your company, including who needs to be there; each session of the workshop and who leads it; and how to turn the output into new messaging.
Basically, I’m sharing everything I’ve learned from doing these workshops with you, the Gobbledy readers.
Oh, you’re thinking, when is this happening? That’s a great question! It’s on Thursday, May 15th, at 2pm Eastern time. It’s free, and I promise it’ll be fun and useful. Hard to beat that combination. Register here.
And truly - thanks to everyone who’s signed up to be a paid subscriber. It means a ton…
This week:
- A couple of ads that you can learn from
- Lawsuits are marketing
- There are 3,000 marketing AI tools
Show (A guy in freezing cold water), Don’t Tell
I’m going to share a couple of ads today, because it’s really amazing how good an ad can be and cost zero dollars. And also how bad an ad can be and cost more than zero dollars. I am not at all suggesting that you should always spend zero dollars on your ad. Well, I might be a little suggesting that you should spend some dollars on marketing (pay an influencer to create an ad), and that you should tell THAT person to spend zero dollars. Because sometimes spending zero dollars will force you really think about a clear, concise way to show your product’s benefits.
Also, before I share ad #1, one of the concerns I have about marketing right now is that AI, while super cool and productivity-enhancing, will ultimately flatten all marketing creative into a very similar mish mosh.
And yes, I know you can tell a tool to use a certain brand voice, tone, etc…Still, I have concerns that it has become increasingly easy to make very average marketing. Which, maybe that’s good enough? Maybe that’s better than what we’ve already got, considering I’ve written 150 columns about how much marketing can be improved?I’m not sure.
Anyway, one way to show that your product has amazing functionality is to talk about the functionality. To wit, chatbot provider Decagon:
Nothing wrong with it, but also probably what every AI chatbot provider would put on their website (see above, re: AI-driven creative).
(Side note: I think it’s fine to say that AI-driven tools are faster and cheaper. It starts to make me just a weeeeee bit uncomfy when it starts touting that it’s smarter than people. Just a thought…)
And while a North Face jacket and a customer service chatbot have little in common (??), North Face markets their jackets as highly functional - they keep you warm and dry. Which you could tell people. Or you could do this:
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I love that - yes, it’s amusing. Yes, even in less than 20 seconds you get a sense of the personality of the creator. But it is really entirely focused on the key functionality of the product (warm and waterproof) and showing that in a really visceral way: “You think I’d be out here [in the water] if this thing wasn’t warm?”
My suggestion for your team: Figure out what the ONE thing is that’s different about your product compared to competitors, and how someone can grasp that idea in 15 seconds? Go!
It’s the End of the World As We Know It
The second ad I wanted to share today is for the end of the world.
Well, not literally the end of the world, but close.
OK. Deep breath. Here’s the story:
A Columbia University student creates a tool called Interview Coder, that allows people to “cheat” (as he calls it) on Zoom interviews and online tests, because it can bring up a little browser in the Zoom window where you can search for answers to things.
He then posts on X that he’s been suspended from Columbia for - oh God it’s really not even worth getting into it - posting information about a disciplinary hearing related to this tool he created to let people cheat in job interviews.
Also, that is some amazing marketing - it’s so good at cheating that Columbia kicked him out.
To my point above - what’s the most visceral way you can show that your product’s key benefit is amazing? In this case, it’s so amazing that an Ivy League school expelled him. (Technically, he was suspended for a year).
Anyway, that whole story gets him (and his co-founder, who was also suspended from Columbia as part of this whole saga) $5 million in seed funding (wow, this whole thing makes me sad), to build a product called Cluely that “helps you cheat on everything.”
They then took some of that $5 million and created this ad, to show what the product can do. Take a look:
Yes, the ad is about how you can use Cluely to lie to a woman on a date about your interests and how old you are.
I guess on a plus note, it’s not about a woman lying about her age. On a not plus note, someone raised $5 million to help people lie about everything.
I also recognize that the Internet was built for lying. The most famous cartoon about the Internet was about lying on the Internet:
That came out in 1993! 1993! I didn’t even remember that the Internet existed in 1993. Virtually the first famous piece of commentary about the Internet was that lying on the Internet was kinda awesome.
I don’t think Cluely sucks because it’s a thing that helps you cheat. I think it sucks because their marketing is “this helps you cheat.” The tagline is “Invisible AI to help you cheat on everything.” It’s lazy and stupid. (And somehow worse, geared to VCs who will think to themselves, “there’s a giant TAM for cheating on everything!”)
Sparknotes, a product that helps students cheat by providing synopses of books, is at least pretty clever about it:
Yes! Not reading a book that was assigned to you DOES simplify studying. Who’s going to argue with that? Not your professor (“You don’t want me to simplify how I study????”).
Damn, I’m jealous of “Studying, simplified.”
Lawsuits Are Marketing
You may have read about the spying scandal (“scandal”) involving competing HR software companies Rippling and Deel that recently became public in a lawsuit. You also may not have read about it (those are the two options - reading about it, and not reading about it).
If you have not read about it, just know that a Deel employee claims that the CEO of the company sent him to go get a job at Rippling so he could steal company secrets.
If this sounds ridiculous, it is. And my favorite part of the story is that when the employee was confronted by a lawyer for Rippling, he ran to the bathroom and tried to flush his phone down the toilet. The phone was too large to be flushed (some of you have experienced similar issues, though not with a phone), so he “smashed [the] old phone with an axe and put it down the drain at [his] mother-in-law's house.”
Anyway, it’s all even stupider than that.
Deel has now countersued Rippling (specifics not important), but I wanted to share a wonderful part of that lawsuit, which is clearly designed to personally destroy Rippling’s CEO Parker Conrad, and remind people that Conrad was embroiled in a controversy at his previous company. And I assume this is all a way to get prospects to question whether they can trust a company like Rippling with their HR & payroll needs (and instead buy Deel):
Haunted by his previous failures, and now fueled by suffocating jealousy at his inability to fairly compete with Deel in the marketplace, Rippling’s co-founder and CEO, Parker Conrad—who was investigated and penalized by the SEC, and exiled from his own former company, Zenefits, for flouting the law—has fallen back on his old playbook: cheating.
…
Conrad grew up on New York City’s Upper East Side, where he earned “mediocre” grades at an expensive and prestigious all-boys preparatory school. Despite his mediocrity, Conrad was then admitted to Harvard University.
Predictably, Conrad then failed out of Harvard, which he described as an “incredibly humiliating and shocking experience”—because he apparently did not attend any classes “for like a year.” Despite Conrad’s forced leave of absence from Harvard, he was eventually readmitted, once again showcasing his privilege.
…
The lawsuit then goes on to talk about how difficult payroll processing is (?), and requires advances in quantum computing:
By way of background, building any kind of payroll engine is an extremely difficult task, and some of the more established companies still use the same historic mainframe they have always used to process payroll, and build their own manufacturing plants to make the parts to keep it running…no one has been able to build a large-scale payroll engine to process payroll on a global scale. Indeed, these likely cannot actually be built without significant advances in quantum computing.
You thought that payroll was easy???? There are mainframes, and those mainframes need parts, and you can’t buy those parts, you have to build your own factory to make the part (to electronically move money from your account to your employee’s account?) and like, nothing is going to change unless something something quantum computing and also Rippling’s CEO failed out of Harvard, which he only got into because he went to a prestigious (and expensive!!) New York City private school. Et cetera.
Sometimes a lawsuit is the best way to make your sales pitch.
(Thanks to Matt Levine’s Money Stuff for that tidbit).
Good Luck If You’re Selling an AI-Based Marketing Tool
One last quick thing:
Does it feel to you like you cannot keep up with all the AI tools that are supposed to make your marketing better?
Does it feel to you like you keep hearing about, I dunno, dozens of new tools every day?
Does it feel to you like this: you know how 20 years ago if someone said to you, “Hey, I’m watching this show called Mad Men, have you seen it?” There were good odds that even if you weren’t watching it, you were, at minimum, vaguely aware that it existed? And you know how 3 years ago you’d be out with someone and they’d say to you, “Hey, I’m watching Starbound Agitators, have you seen it?” And I’d say, “What’s that on?” And they’d say, “C’mon, man, it’s on Plex!” And I’d say, “I don’t know what any of those things are.” That’s how I feel whenever someone mentions any AI tool, because nobody ever mentions the same tool as someone else.
Any time someone brings up an AI marketing tool does it feel like this classic Tweet that reader Brian S. recently sent to me:
(heh heh)
Does it feel like you’re crazy because you haven’t heard of whatever AI marketing tool someone mentions?
Well, you shouldn’t feel crazy. CMO person and newsletter writer Carilu Dietrich shared this screenshot from G2:
You didn’t read that wrong. There are 3,730 Marketing AI tools being tracked by G2.
Three thousand, seven hundred and thirty.
And just about every one of those people has a head of marketing trying to differentiate themselves. Godspeed.
As always, thanks for reading to the end (it’s the best part).
If you’re wondering how we can work together, there are 3 ways:
1) Your company can reach thousands of marketers by advertising in the newsletter and podcast.
2) You can get a homepage facelift (tm?) when I review your homepage and provide best practices to transform it.
3) I can lead your team through a full messaging workshop, where we’ll fully transform your messaging, top to bottom, so your prospects will embrace your story.
Always happy to talk - jared@sagelett.com
Please dear god I hope no one ever tries to jizz me on Smackdog.
So, the guy who tried to flush his phone (do people think they can flush a phone?) then had to grab it out of the toilet?