What changes in consumer behavior have you seen during your career and how have businesses adapted to them?

[kumartk]

Expectations are high. You’re competing with the best experiences customers have. They expect your app to be as good as Uber, with content like Netflix, and personalization like Amazon. An outdated customer experience is a wasted opportunity.

Customers are also becoming more aware of privacy issues. They expect to have great, fully digital and personalized experiences, but they also expect companies to respect their privacy. They expect instant product delivery, easy exchanges, self-service. They expect their questions to be answered within 30 seconds from the time they see an ad to the time they purchase and after they use the product.

What inspired you to teach a course on artificial intelligence in marketing?
I started out as an entrepreneur and invested a lot of money in marketing. I iran phone number data bought ads and then became the chief evangelist for Google. I advised top companies on how to improve their strategy. I worked with their CMOs and CEOs and learned what they did. Honestly, I learned as much, if not more, from them than I taught them.

My motivation is that with these new AI tools, any company, regardless of size, can deliver advertising and a customer experience that's as good as Uber, Amazon, or Netflix. I want to help every company deliver an extraordinary customer experience. It's good for businesses, it's good for the economy, it's good for consumers. So it's really about making things better. Businesses will make more money, they'll employ more people, and their customers will be happier.

Students will learn how the best marketers win, how they think, how they use artificial intelligence, and why they have an edge over others. If they copy and adopt this, they will become world-class marketers.


So the most important thing when using AI in marketing is to think to win . If you want to win, tell the AI ​​that you want to win instead of striving for perfection.

Another mindset shift is that digital ad measurement is not perfect for many reasons, including privacy. You know roughly that you're getting a five-to-one return on investment. You can track it better than you can on TV, but there's still some uncertainty, plus or minus 30-40%.

Some companies are doing this. It's like having a lottery ticket where there's a 70% chance it's going to be $10. You keep buying lottery tickets because it makes sense from a risk perspective. But most companies are trying to be perfect. They can't break out of that mindset. I can't measure it perfectly, so I'm not going to scale it.