Using AI to Power AI and Leverage AI for AI-Powered Leverage
And Howard Stern and ice cream
Hello Gobbledeers,
How’s it going? I’m sure you’ve spent the past week setting up your profile on Threads, swearing you’ll never use Twitter again, then using Twitter again. It’s OK, you’re forgiven.
Nobody Takes the 4th P Seriously
Everyone took the first pee seriously… The issue of Gobbledy two weeks ago which focused on Urinal Based Marketing (UBM) was the most read issue of this newsletter ever. Thank you. Also, I don’t know what that says about me or you. Actually, I do know what it means, but I’m OK with us all loving bathroom marketing.
And thanks to reader Sean J. who sent me this:
With that out of the way, that actually wasn’t the P I was referring to up above…
In your first day of marketing class, you learned about the 4 P’s — Product, Price, Promotion and Place. In my time in marketing (and certainly in software marketing), Product, Price and (less so in software, more so in retail) Promotion get a lot of love, while Place (where you buy the product) is tossed away like an old bit of UBM after the 3rd day of a conference.
Founders tend to raise money on Product* - though “we’re the low priced version of X” or “we’re the luxury version of X” also are reasonable ways to launch a new product.
(* Founders really raise money based on getting investors to believe in them and the team, almost moreso than the product…let’s just skip over that.)
But Place gets much less love, so I wanted to call out a story about a canned (?) wine company that has focused their efforts on unique distribution channels like hotels and stadiums.
I actually don’t have a ton to add here (this is the type of hard-hitting advice that I know you subscribe for) except that if you sell canned wine, and canned wine shelf space is crowded with other, uh, cans of wine (?), then you have a few options:
Raise or lower the price of the wine to try to get the fancypants or notfancypants corners of the market.
Introduce new flavors of canned wine, and/or add oatmilk to it.
Change the packaging (though you did this already by sticking the wine into a can.)**
Give a rebate to retailers who sell a bunch of the wine. (This is the tactic that is currently not working for Bud Light.)
Sell the wine someplace other canned wine merchants are not yet selling.
(** If you think changing the packaging doesn’t matter, I’m fascinated with this story about delicious-but-twice-bankrupt NYC-based ice cream company Ample Hills. Their founders became obsessed with making square pints - rather than round pints - for, I’d argue, stupid brand reasons. As the story I linked to notes: “Among other things, the corners of square pints melt faster, and the packaging breaks off. They are harder to fill properly… Plus, filling the [square pints] required a custom-made $180,000 machine, one that, in the case of Ample Hills, never worked properly.” You will also not be shocked to hear that - like all founders who-will-not-be-dissuaded-from-stupid-ideas - the founder of Ample Hills oft invoked Steve Jobs.)
Anyway, if you take the “go where the others aren’t” school of thought, that last idea (sell wine where other wine companies aren’t selling) looks awfully appealing. Hotels and stadiums are not currently (?) inundated with cans of wine, so there’s an opportunity to sell your wine there. (Duh? Except also not duh, as new distribution channels have all sorts of as-yet-undiscovered challenges, which adds risk, just as square pints add as-yet-undiscovered challenges.)
The Girl Scouts, for example, don’t bother trying to jam their Samoas onto already-crowded supermarket shelves…they jam their Samoas into the hands of idle 9 year old girls sitting on your street corner 3 days a year (h/t to John Mulaney.). Perhaps scarcity + unique distribution channel = success.
This can work in tech, as well. Facebook - long before becoming the place where you go to see pictures of the children of the 3 people you went to high school with who still use Facebook, and also the place you go when you want to read something where, right afterwards you think to yourself, “Huh, I didn’t know that person I went to high school with is now very, very religious. But like, not in a way I’m comfortable with” - was initially only available to people with .edu email addresses at a limited number of colleges. This was a brilliant move - they limited distribution of the tech to colleges (in a clever way, using .edu email addresses) which, like Girl Scout cookies, created scarcity, which drove demand.
And, as we’ve discussed here before, “let me see if you’re eligible for this product” is always an effective selling technique.
Using AI to Power AI and Leverage AI for AI-Powered Leverage
Back when I was a senior in high school, I would drive to school in the morning and park in the senior lot (suck it, juniors!) and listen to Howard Stern. Don’t judge me, it’s 1990. Or judge me, I don’t care!
One of the most under-appreciated parts of Stern’s show was the live reads of ads he did for sponsors. I would show up late for class because I would sit and listen to him talk about Fortunoff’s department store for 15 minutes, bragging about how unlike other department stores, their escalators go both up AND down.
(Side note: Many years later I was at a work dinner thingy and sat next to one of the children of the Fortunoffs family - the store had long gone out of business, despite Stern’s live-read ads. I told him how I used to sit in the parking lot and listen to the ads about Fortunoffs. He was unimpressed. His face suggested he was thinking, “Annnnddddd?” And nothing. That’s the whole story. Your escalators go up and down. That’s the whole story, Mr. Fortunoff son. And yes, we have to sit together awkwardly for 3 more hours.)
No one does live reads like Stern did.
Today, we get a bunch of live reads on podcasts, and often the host has zero idea what the ad is actually about, as I noticed when listening to sports podcast person (tm) Bill Simmons do a live read about HR software company Workday.
I do not blame Simmons for this. If you’re a software company and you want a host to do a live read, it may help to make sure the copy was not generated by ChatGPT (or in this case, ShatGPT, as somebody shat out this pile of gobbledy):
Workday is a cloud-native finance and hr system that changes as your needs change. It’s designed to power the future of work, delivering on the promise of machine learning and AI. That means you can automate repetitive and predictable tasks and help your team improve their skills through personalized recommendations and leverage AI to equip you with intelligent insights so you can focus on more strategic work.
Oh, so it leverages AI to deliver on the promise of machine learning and AI to give you intelligent insights, all powered by the future of work? ANNNNNNDDDD it changes as your needs change? Well, goddammit, I’ll get two!
What I’m saying is that if you’re going to pay a whole bunch of money to have a podcast host do a live read, maybe actually give them some, y’know, pieces of actual information about your product that might resonate with someone listening to a podcast that spent 45 minutes talking about an NBA Summer League game.
I swear, it’s not that difficult. Or maybe it IS difficult, but still - “It’s designed to power the future of work, delivering on the promise of machine learning and AI.”
You’ve got like, what, 75 words? Why are those 17 of them? It’s just mouth sounds. Go and re-read that sentence:
“It’s designed to power the future of work, delivering on the promise of machine learning and AI.”
It makes me so sad for them. The whole point of a live read is that the host can inject some humanity and personal anecdotes into the ad. What personal anecdote goes with delivering on the promise of machine learning and AI to power the future of work?
I’ve been thinking about this tweet from Nik Sharma (who runs an agency that helps consumer products companies sell online) that’s part of a thread about why your website is disappointing:
It really hits on the single issue I see more than any other when I work with companies on messaging: they’re very comfortable selling the category they’re in (you should get a site search tool!) and they’re very uncomfortable selling THEIR site search tool.
You can see it in the Workday example - there are lots of HR and finance tools out there…what does Workday do that none of the others do? (Uh, powers the future of work?) As Nik says, why should I buy YOUR product?
I’ve learned why this happens - if you say something specific in your marketing, someone (often in sales, but sometimes in marketing) will say, “yeah, but what about people who aren’t interested in that feature - they won’t know that we do this, that and the other thing?”
Yes, that’s true.
But NOBODY is looking for a tool that “changes as my needs change.” That’s gobbledy.
Messaging tends to be garbage when it’s afraid to take any stand at all.
Specific something is always better than non-specific anything.
Thanks for spending some time with us this week. As always, I’m thrilled when people share the (free) gift of Gobbledy with others. And even more thrilled when they hire me to help them improve their company’s messaging and positioning. Email me at jared@sagelett.com.
I love ads like that Workday one when they’re a product you use. Workday! It’s a place to enter your vacation days and jury duty and look at your pay statements! It’s using AI to make that better. Um, ok if you need to think that.
Ample Hills? Really?