AI is easy. Different is hard with Jay Manciocchi
Why AI is making brand strategy, creativity and differentiation more valuable, not less.
AI has made marketing faster, cheaper and more prolific. Great. Now everybody has the same superpower.
So how the hell do you stand out?
In this episode of Marketing Mischief & Mayhem, TheorySF Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Russell Quinan sits down with Jay Manciocchi, CMO of Wipro's AI-Native Business and Platform Unit, to talk about what actually matters when everyone has access to increasingly similar tools, intelligence and language.
Jay has led marketing and content at Intel, Accenture, Anaplan, Morgan Stanley, BMC and Forge. Now he's helping market an AI-native business—which makes him particularly qualified to answer a question technology marketers are wrestling with:
If AI makes competent marketing easier, what becomes more valuable?
His answer: strategy, creativity, differentiation and human judgment.
And that's where things get interesting.
Podcast Transcript:
What CMOs will learn
In this episode, Russell and Jay get into:
What “AI-native” actually means—and how to keep it from becoming the next meaningless “digital transformation.”
Why most B2B technology marketing sounds the same, even when companies desperately want to differentiate.
Why “faster, smarter, seamless and transformative” aren't positioning. They're table stakes.
What marketers should—and shouldn't—hand over to AI.
Why branding, naming and final creative judgment still need humans.
How to keep bold creative ideas from getting murdered by committee.
Why every stakeholder shouldn't get an equal vote on creative.
Which marketing metrics actually connect to revenue—and which are decorative throw pillows.
And why, as AI makes execution cheaper, original strategy and creative thinking become more valuable.
Jay's simple positioning diagnostic is particularly useful: if no credible competitor would claim the opposite of your message, you're probably not positioned at all. You're stating table stakes with confidence.
AI-Native vs. AI-Powered: What's the Difference?
One of the first questions Russell asks is what AI-native should actually mean.
Jay separates it into two ideas: AI-native workers and AI-native platforms.
An AI-native worker doesn't simply know how to use ChatGPT or Copilot. They redesign how work gets done around AI—building repeatable systems, prompts and agent workflows while understanding where AI works, where it fails and when it shouldn't be used at all.
An AI-native platform is similarly different from software with AI bolted onto it. AI is foundational to its architecture, interactions, continuous learning and agentic workflows.
And yes, Jay believes that distinction can become a meaningful positioning advantage—provided the company actually has the technology and credibility to support the claim.
Why Does So Much B2B Tech Marketing Sound the Same?
Faster. Smarter. Seamless. Transformative.
Sound familiar?
Russell and Jay argue that these aren't differentiators anymore. They're expectations.
Jay offers a wonderfully simple test:
Could your competitor credibly say the same thing?
If the answer is yes, keep digging.
As Russell puts it, why spend money promoting category claims when you could be building a bigger brand reason for customers to choose you?
That's particularly important in crowded B2B technology, AI, SaaS and cybersecurity categories, where sameness has become one of marketing's biggest problems.
Related TheorySF thinking
The Courage Gap: Why Most B2B Tech Positioning Fails
You Spent $500,000 to Say “Powering What's Next”
What Should Marketing Hand Over to AI?
Quite a lot, according to Jay.
AI is already extremely useful for first drafts, research synthesis, competitive monitoring, localization and repurposing long-form content.
But there's an important distinction:
AI can get you most of the way there. Humans still own the last editorial mile.
And there are some areas where Jay believes humans should remain firmly in charge—particularly branding, naming, sensitive customer communications, regulated communications and crisis situations.
That's a useful distinction for CMOs trying to decide where AI creates efficiency versus where it creates sameness or risk.
How Do You Keep Great Creative From Getting Killed by Committee?
Here's where the conversation gets particularly useful for senior marketers.
The problem isn't necessarily that too many people have opinions.
It's that every opinion gets treated as though it carries equal authority.
Jay argues that CMOs need to separate input from authority. Legal should evaluate risk. Product should evaluate factual accuracy. Sales can bring evidence about buyer response. But that doesn't mean everyone gets to rewrite the headline.
His other advice: build support before the big meeting.
Russell shares how this worked on a major global campaign: the team privately showed important stakeholders the bold creative before the formal presentation, listened to their concerns and built ownership without allowing the idea to be dismantled.
By the time the campaign reached the C-suite, advocates were already sitting around the table.
That's not creative compromise.
That's organizational jujitsu.
Related:
Why Most Marketing Gets Weaker Before It Goes Live
Which Marketing Metrics Actually Matter?
Jay divides marketing measurement into two useful buckets.
On the meaningful side: pipeline created and influenced, multi-touch attribution, win rate, sales-cycle length, cost per qualified opportunity, sales adoption of marketing assets and return engagement.
On the decorative-throw-pillow side: impressions, follower counts, generic engagement rates and downloads treated as intent—particularly when those metrics aren't connected to conversion or revenue.
His broader rule is simple:
Before you create the content, campaign or event, know how you're going to measure it.
So, Does AI Make Strategy More Valuable?
This may be the most important idea in the episode.
As intelligence gets cheaper and execution gets faster, strategy becomes more valuable, not less.
AI can produce astonishing amounts of competent work. But it hasn't replaced original creative thinking, great branding or strategic judgment.
Which creates an interesting paradox for CMOs:
The easier marketing becomes to make, the harder it becomes to make marketing that matters.
Or, as we like to put it:
AI is easy. Different is hard.
About Marketing Mischief & Mayhem
Marketing Mischief & Mayhem is a TheorySF podcast hosted by Russell Quinan, Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of TheorySF.
Russell talks with CMOs and senior marketing leaders about brand strategy, B2B technology marketing, creativity, AI, growth, positioning and what's actually happening inside modern marketing organizations.
Real CMOs. Real talk. No B.S.
Explore more Marketing Mischief & Mayhem episodes
About TheorySF
TheorySF is a San Francisco brand strategy and creative agency helping B2B technology, AI, SaaS and challenger brands create sharper positioning, differentiated brands, go-to-market strategies and creative campaigns designed to get noticed—and remembered.
Full Podcast Transcript: Russell Quinan + Jay Manciocchi
RUSSELL QUINAN:
Hey everybody, and welcome back to another episode of Marketing Mischief & Mayhem, the show where we talk with senior marketers and CMOs at great technology companies to learn what's really happening in the trenches of B2B marketing.
My name is Russell Quinan. I'm the Chief Strategy Officer of TheorySF in San Francisco. We work with technology firms on go-to-market strategy, branding, planning, and more. We've had these amazing conversations with our clients and friends in the industry, and we thought we'd open them up and let everybody hear what's happening right now in the trenches of marketing.
Today I'm very excited about our guest. He has spent much of his career performing one of marketing's most dangerous jobs: making extremely complicated technology sound interesting to actual human beings.
Jay Manichaki has led marketing and content at Intel, Accenture, Anaplan, Morgan Stanley, BMC, and Forge, and has recently stepped into the new role of CMO for Wipro's new AI-native business and platform unit. Along the way, he's launched platforms, built content engines, helped generate serious pipeline, introduced AI into marketing operations, and survived enough enterprise messaging meetings to know that transitioning to the future usually means nobody has agreed on the headline yet.
Today we're going to talk about what AI-native should actually mean and why so much technology marketing sounds exactly the same, whether AI is making marketers smarter or merely faster, and how creativity survives inside enormous organizations filled with stakeholders, acronyms, and people asking if we can make the logo bigger.
Jay, welcome to Marketing Mischief & Mayhem.
JAY MANICHAKI:
Thanks so much, Russell. Great to be with you today.
RUSSELL:
As we always do, let's get right into it. You are now marketing AI-native businesses. That phrase is suddenly appearing everywhere, usually accompanied by a glowing blue orb. What does AI-native actually mean, and how do you stop it from becoming the new "digital transformation"?
JAY:
Absolutely. When I think of AI-native, I'm really thinking of two contexts: AI-native workers and AI-native platforms and technology.
Let's start with the first one. AI-native workers are distinguishable. As much as there's doom and gloom around the tech job landscape these days, AI-native workers are very much in high demand. I'm talking about workers and employees who design and complete work with AI-first approaches, whether that's building repeatable systems, prompts, or agent workflows. These people know where AI fails, but also have the sound judgment about when not to use it and, of course, when to use it.
If you contrast AI-native with AI-aware or AI-fluent, I think of AI-fluent as being comfortable and competent across several AI tools. They use AI deliberately, but the pre-AI process is still the default path. AI-aware people might have used ChatGPT, Gemini, or Copilot. They may treat AI as a novelty or use it for some content creation, but no real workflow has actually changed.
If we switch gears to AI-native platforms, I'm thinking of a platform built from the ground up with AI at its core foundation rather than bolting something on. The foundational architecture is AI-native, whether that's data processing or natural-language interfaces. Users interact with the platform with conversational commands, there's continuous learning, and, of course, agentic workflows.
Those are the two primary situations when I hear AI-native: the workers or the actual platforms that are deployed.
You referenced digital transformation a few seconds ago. Lord knows the overuse of that term. We've been so overwhelmed by "digital transformation" that it got to the point where it could mean anything, so it ultimately came to mean nothing. Eventually it just meant, "We bought software and technology," and then it became a tagline on company homepages and ads.
I'm hoping AI-native sticks to the categories I just mentioned and doesn't become as overused as digital transformation.
RUSSELL:
What strikes me, Jay, is that back in the day I was working on AT&T, and Sprint had come onto the scene to make a run at the category. They said, "Built digital from the ground up," whereas the competitors were legacy players transitioning plain old telephone service. Sprint put a lot into that positioning: built digital from the ground up.
It feels like we're in that same kind of moment. We have clients now who are making that distinction of being AI-native all the way down to the foundation. Do you think the market is going to see that as an actual benefit versus bolt-on AI? Is it really going to make a difference in the performance of the product?
JAY:
Very much so. It's as if history is repeating itself. Turn back the clock roughly 15 years and remember the advent of cloud-native. Distinct advantages went to companies that positioned themselves as cloud-native software and platforms.
Fast-forward 15 years and here we are. The game is changing, and when you speak with analysts, they're coming up with new categories germane to AI-native.
RUSSELL:
So you're saying yes, go for it. If we are AI-native, let's call it that.
JAY:
Absolutely. If you have the technology and the street cred to make the claim that you're AI-native, I would advise companies to position themselves accordingly.
RUSSELL:
You've marketed AI, IoT, cloud platforms, enterprise software, and private-market investing. When the product is complicated, how do you simplify the story without simplifying it into meaninglessness?
JAY:
I use two approaches I swear by. One is what I call "talking to Grandma at Thanksgiving dinner," and the other is emotive storytelling.
When you sit down with Grandma at Thanksgiving dinner, she probably asks, "How's the job going? What's new in your career?" If you're trying to explain complex technology to someone who doesn't live in that world, you need to tell the story in a way that resonates.
Part of that is what I call emotive storytelling. Roughly 13 years ago, I was working at Intel, and we were one of the first companies to come out with our own Internet of Things platform. I was in Barcelona at IoT Solutions World Congress, and one of my bosses, Jonathan Ballin, got up on stage. He knew people didn't really want to talk about sensor architecture. They wanted to hear how IoT was transforming their lives for the better.
There was a video that launched the conference showing crops in desert-like conditions becoming more bountiful because of IoT technology, smart cities operating more efficiently, and healthcare applications using IoT.
RUSSELL:
Was this under the Smarter Planet campaign that was happening?
JAY:
Honestly, I don't recall. But the takeaway is that when you tell an impactful, emotive story that makes someone perk up and pay attention, getting lost in the technical details isn't as important. That can lead a non-technical audience closer to a buying decision and also get people excited about the technology.
RUSSELL:
Most technology companies claim to be faster, smarter, seamless, and transformative. We've heard that a lot. If everyone is saying those same four things, is that a messaging problem or a failure of strategy much earlier in the process?
JAY:
I think as intelligence and access to intelligence have become less expensive, strategy is perhaps more important than ever.
Here's a cheap diagnostic: read the claims and ask whether any credible competitor could assert the opposite. Nobody is marketing themselves as slower or more disjointed. If the inverse of your claim is absurd, you haven't truly positioned. You're stating table stakes with confidence.
No writer or content creator can perfectly fix that downstream. I've heard "make it differentiated" many times, but in this environment, where there's so much noise, oodles of AI slop, and an incredible volume of content, you have to be bold. You have to be courageous in your plays, and you have to have leadership that will support you.
So, is it a failure of strategy? To be strategic, you need strong air cover from leadership so you can be bold, courageous, and truly differentiated instead of doing whatever the next person did.
In my current role, I was heartened when the Chief Strategy Officer and other members of the executive leadership team told me, "Jay, you're going to be bold. You can be courageous. You have license to do that." I've only been in the role a few weeks, but stay tuned to the fall and you'll see some of that boldness and creativity come to the fore.
RUSSELL:
That's amazing. You don't get that very often. I love that you said "table stakes." That's something we say, too. Who's going to say they're slower? If you're going to buy the technology, it should be faster, smarter, and seamless.
So why spend a dime supporting that kind of messaging when we could be supporting a bigger brand reason why you want to do business with us in the first place? That's not a category claim.
That's the big problem I have right now, especially in cybersecurity. You go to shows like RSA and it's all category messaging. So few companies have the courage to be bold and distinctive and actually get attention.
It's okay not to be everything to everybody. It's okay to be great for your perfect audience. And it's okay to turn off some people along the way. Folks seem to have forgotten that somewhere in the process.
JAY:
When it's bold and distinctive, it's going to smack you in the face like you didn't see it coming - and I mean that in a good way.
When I think of bold, I remember driving down 101 from the Valley to San Francisco and seeing a billboard that said, "Expensify: expense reports that don't suck," or walking into Union Square and seeing a huge Colin Kaepernick Nike billboard with a line about standing for something.
There are moments where I can easily recognize bold or courageous marketing, and I'm grateful every day that I'm being given the license to do that.
RUSSELL:
I want to challenge you on something, because we're friends. "Expense reports that don't suck" immediately gives me a problem because any expense company could say that.
It reminds me of the dot-com boom when WebEx was launching. They put an ad in San Francisco with RuPaul reclined, and the billboard said, "Meetings used to be a real drag."
It was a very large billboard near the entrance to I-80 from downtown, and that one bugged me too, because you spent so much money to say something anybody else could say.
We just put out an article about trade-show messaging, and the headline is, "You just spent $500,000 to tell people that you're inventing the future." It's these broad messages with no differentiation.
What we use here at TheorySF is: Could anybody else say this? If they could, then we're still in category language and need to move to something else. Would you agree with that?
JAY:
Yes. You have to go out of your way these days to be distinctive.
The reason the Expensify billboard caught my eye is that, at the time, it was rare to see a billboard on 101 with the word "suck" or anything that pointedly negative. Now it's much more common parlance in tech marketing.
Turn back the clock roughly 10 years and it was more provocative. But I get your point very much: you have to go out of your way to be differentiated and distinct these days.
RUSSELL:
Exactly. The problem on 101, especially going down to Silicon Valley, is that all these new AI companies have a headline and a logo and I have no idea what they do. There's no understanding. It's almost like a vanity play - they just wanted a billboard on 101.
Nobody figured out the positioning. I think it's such wasted money if the viewer can't say: I know what you are, I know what you do, and I understand your position or differentiation. Without those three elements, I think it's a waste of money.
JAY:
If you drive from Mountain View or Santa Clara to San Francisco, you could create a drinking game around how many times you see the word "agent" in AI. You'll be inebriated by the time you get there.
RUSSELL:
You'd be hammered by South San Francisco. You haven't even gotten to all the billboards yet.
All right, moving on. What parts of marketing should AI take over immediately, and what parts should we keep away from it like a toddler holding a permanent marker?
JAY:
I have a strong perspective on this. AI is good, and it gets better every day, but as someone whose lineage and heritage are in content marketing, I would say that nothing currently replaces the last editorial mile. You still need a human in the loop.
Content creation and first drafts - not the final polished work you release to the public - are things AI can handle today. Research synthesis, competitive monitoring, localization to some extent, and repurposing a long-form piece of content into four or five blog posts are also things AI can handle. Of course, a human must review it before you press publish.
Conversely, there are things where you need a human very much at the center. I would say branding and naming. That's not to say you can't use AI for ideation, but for the final branding decision, AI isn't quite there yet.
The same goes for things involving a customer's or partner's name, something that could get a regulator's attention in highly regulated industries, or a crisis. Those need to be treated very much with a human in the loop.
One thing we're just starting to dip our toes into is AI agents with paid ad spend, which is still a little tricky. But I believe there's a clear differentiation between things AI is very good at right now and those areas that still need a human at the core.
RUSSELL:
You've built content-governance systems inside some very large organizations. How do you create consistency without accidentally institutionalizing boredom?
JAY:
Great question. With content governance, you have to wear a diplomatic hat, and I've learned some hard lessons the hard way.
Several years back, I joined an IT technology company and gave a keynote at the Optimizely user conference about going from content chaos to content governance. I walked into an organization where, depending on where you sat, there were different brand treatments and no uniformity in messaging.
So we convened a content-governance council. The first step is bringing in not only marketing, but the other parts of the business that are affected. You don't want just a marketing governance council.
Beyond that, the council has to adhere to several fundamental strategic pillars that everybody eventually agrees on. For example, every piece of content might need to be peer-reviewed before it goes out the door, and every piece of content might need to originate in your content marketing platform, whether that's Optimizely CMP or Adobe Workfront.
Once you agree on eight to 12 pillars, you have the backbone of your content-governance plan. Then it's about evangelism and socialization of that plan - making sure the leaders of the council spread the gospel to other parts of the business.
Some people will view you as the content cop: "Here comes Jay" or "Here comes Russell" trying to make things too regimented. But in an enterprise setting, you need governance or things will run completely amok.
That doesn't mean you have to be Mr. or Mrs. Dull. But you need a foundational governance structure to make sure things don't go off-brand and one part of the business isn't speaking a different language from another. It's not an easy needle to thread. Content leaders embarking on that journey can reach out to me - I've got a few battle wounds I can share to make the journey less painful.
RUSSELL:
We all have those wounds, my friend.
This leads beautifully into the next question. Enterprise marketing often requires consensus from product, sales, legal, leadership, and all those mysterious people who appear only during final approval. They come out of thin air and sand down all the interesting things in an ad or message so it doesn't offend anybody. They take out the hooks for fear they might turn someone off.
That makes it really challenging to bring breakthrough creative through a committee. Like we say here, there was no committee behind any great artist making a great work of art.
So how do you prevent a strong idea, a great piece of creative, or great messaging from becoming sanded down, neutered, or turned into some kind of Franken-message just to get it approved? Because we know what's going to happen when we run that message: nothing. Right?
JAY:
Yeah. It harkens back to what I said at the outset: you have to have air cover from leadership so you can be bold. If you state your case logically and impactfully, they need to support your bold messaging and decisions.
You also have to separate input from authority before anyone sees the draft. The Franken-message isn't really caused by too many opinions. It's caused by every opinion carrying the same weight. The reality is that not all opinions carry the same weight.
I've worked in finance and highly regulated industries. Compliance and legal can rain on your parade, so I try to sort feedback by type. Legal is thinking about risk and whether something could put you in hot water. Product is focused on factual accuracy. Sales brings evidence about what buyers are truly responding to.
Each person is going to have a voice, but before you approach these people, sometimes it's not a bad idea to have a sidebar and court them with the bold idea first.
RUSSELL:
You are totally right. When I was launching a big global campaign for a major computer company, it was a huge effort and we had very bold creative.
We came up with the strategy, in collaboration with our clients, to have sidebars with everybody who was going to be in the meeting to approve the campaign. We individually showed them the campaign ahead of time. We made them feel part of it, heard their concerns, and tried to address those concerns as best we could without damaging the creative.
By the time we got into the big meeting with the C-suite, we had support and everybody felt like they had some ownership. The campaign sold through. I'm not going to say effortlessly, but it probably would have been torpedoed had we not done that.
So that's great advice. I have firsthand knowledge that it works.
JAY:
I appreciate it. That's part of the diplomacy of being a marketing leader. Figuratively speaking, you have to kiss a few babies and perhaps kiss a few frogs before you find your prince of a campaign.
RUSSELL:
That's right. And that leads into my next question.
Marketers say they love bold creative work. I'm in this industry because I love bold creative work. Then bold creative shows up and everybody suddenly says, "Whoa, wait a second. Dial that back. Can we go back 10 or 15 percent?"
How do you determine whether an organization is genuinely ready to be distinctive? When you joined Wipro, you were given latitude to be bold and courageous. How do you know how far to take it and where your limits are?
JAY:
A natural rule of thumb is: take it as far as you can without getting sued. You don't want to have to tell your boss that your bold act resulted in a lawsuit - unless somehow it plays to your favor.
There are cases where sensationalism has played in a company's favor. But you need to be bold while also informing your most senior leaders about that boldness before it goes out.
It truly takes a distinct type of leadership to give you that air cover. And you obviously want to avoid anything that's going to be financially or legally injurious to your brand. That's my perspective at a high level.
RUSSELL:
Fair enough. You've connected content to measurable pipeline at significant scale. What should marketers measure to prove business value? And which popular metrics are mostly decorative throw pillows?
JAY:
I love the term "throw pillows."
Let's start with the metrics that really matter. I put those in a category where you're measuring things that survive contact with a revenue conversation: pipeline created and influenced, the attribution rules you've developed - hopefully you're not still on last-touch attribution and can use multi-touch attribution - win rate and sales-cycle length on deals that touched marketing versus deals that didn't, and cost per qualified opportunity.
I also like to measure sales adoption and use of the marketing assets that are created, as well as multi-visit and return engagement.
Then there's the other category. It's not that these things aren't important, because you have to measure a lot of things, but simple impressions, follower counts, time on page, aggregate engagement rate, and PDF downloads treated as intent can become throw-pillow metrics.
I saw an ad yesterday with a tombstone that said the MQL is dead. I don't think it's completely dead, but raw MQL volume divorced from conversion is slightly throw-pillow-esque.
Any time you create content, start an event, or plan a campaign, at its inception you should be thinking: How am I going to measure this? Every piece of content is measurable to some extent, and it has a lifecycle from ideation to publishing to end of life and everywhere in between. That's the mindset.
RUSSELL:
Last question in this portion of the interview. AI makes competent marketing execution faster and cheaper. Does strategy and original creative thinking become more valuable, or will companies mistakenly conclude they need less of both?
JAY:
Sound creative thinking, sound branding, and strategy are more important than ever because intelligence is cheaper and execution is faster and cheaper.
It's amazing what you can do with Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, and other platforms. What you can execute in such a short period of time is remarkable. But it hasn't taken the place of great creative, great branding, and great strategy that comes from human brains.
I have a title with the words AI-native in it, but I'm the biggest proponent of human-in-the-loop approaches because AI isn't good enough yet to extract the human from the dynamic.
RUSSELL:
Testify. Good.
And now we're transitioning to my mom's favorite part of the podcast: the lightning round. These are quick-fire questions and short answers. You don't have to justify them, Jay. Just tell me your first thought. I'm going to score these and we'll see if you're coming back to the Champions League.
Most abused word in technology marketing?
JAY:
These days, perhaps "agentic."
RUSSELL:
One buzzword you would permanently delete from PowerPoint?
JAY:
"Supporting evidence" is one that jumps into my head.
RUSSELL:
Which phrase is worse: "AI-powered" or "built for what's next"?
JAY:
I'd say "AI-powered" if it doesn't have the substantiating street cred.
RUSSELL:
Brand campaign or demand-gen campaign: which gets invited to the better parties?
JAY:
Brand. No doubt about that.
RUSSELL:
How many stakeholders does it take to ruin a headline?
JAY:
It only takes one, unfortunately - one influential stakeholder to rain on your parade.
RUSSELL:
The logo is already enormous. How do you respond to, "Can we make it bigger?"
JAY:
Show me the business value. Show me the data that proves it's going to make it more valuable.
RUSSELL:
White paper: valuable thought leadership or PDF Witness Protection Program?
JAY:
White papers still have some utility, but I'll never forget an old boss who said, "If I see one more damn white paper that's over 10 pages, you're going to be done with white papers."
There's more content now, and we have less time to read it. So gone are the days of 20-page white papers, unless it's research, science, healthcare, or that type of thing.
RUSSELL:
Well, I'll just send my agent to read it.
What's more dangerous: a blank page or a CEO with a tagline?
JAY:
A CEO with a tagline that hasn't been well thought out and doesn't understand its business goal. That's dangerous.
RUSSELL:
First thing you distrust in a marketing dashboard?
JAY:
Some of those throw-pillow metrics, but also anytime you're getting measurements from two different platforms and they're reporting something in the same category that's fundamentally different. That makes me suspicious.
RUSSELL:
One task you would happily surrender to AI forever?
JAY:
For anybody, myself included, who might have to seek a new job in this market: if you're not using AI for your job search, you're crazy. I would highly encourage people to leverage the most sophisticated AI possible for their job prospects.
RUSSELL:
One marketing task AI should never be allowed to touch?
JAY:
Branding and naming. Use it for ideation, but the final call sticks with the human.
RUSSELL:
I love this question. Trade-show swag - what we used to call trinkets and trash. Give me your top three things you'd actually take home from a trade show.
JAY:
I have kids, and I'm so done with socks. I have a whole section of my top drawer filled with trade-show socks. So no socks.
If you've got kids, stuffed animals are always a huge hit. Chargers - I always need chargers of some sort. They have never-ending utility.
RUSSELL:
Give me a third. You don't want to lose points. And don't you dare say a stress ball with a logo on it.
JAY:
Lighting. One of those little lighting things. So stuffed animals, lighting, and chargers. I'm practical. I don't need any more socks.
RUSSELL:
Best place to have a breakthrough idea: the shower, an airplane, or a meeting you shouldn't be attending?
JAY:
To keep it spicy, a meeting I shouldn't be attending.
RUSSELL:
If enterprise software marketing were a cocktail, what would be in it?
JAY:
I'm going to go with vodka. Vodka needs to be in there.
RUSSELL:
Fair enough. Last question, and this is your chance to double your points. Complete this sentence: You know the strategy is in trouble when someone says...
JAY:
"Have we looked at the data?" If they haven't considered data points in formulating strategy, I think in this modern era you're not doing your due diligence.
RUSSELL:
Outstanding. Jay, that is the episode. That is the show. Thank you so much for joining me and sharing your extensive knowledge. I appreciate all the insights you've delivered, and I know our audience will appreciate them. Thanks for playing with us.
JAY:
Thank you, my friend. Great to be here today. I really enjoyed Marketing Mischief & Mayhem.
