The Spotlight: Conversations with AI Marketing Leaders

Welcome and Introductions

Loreal Lynch: Hello everyone and thank you for joining us today for the Spotlight. The Spotlight is a new series coming to you from Jasper and we are hoping to shed light on the wonderful marketing leaders that are leading the way in AI to talk about, you know, thoughts on what AI is really bringing to our field and to our discipline and what the future of marketing looks like with AI. So we appreciate you joining today. I'm very excited. Our first guest that we have with us today is Shane Murphy Reuter, who's the CMO of Webflow.

So hello there Shane. I'll let you do an intro of yourself in just a minute. Just a couple of housekeeping items. We want this to be very conversational and so you'll see that there's a chat here.

So as we go on, feel free to put your questions into the chat. We will reserve about 10 minutes at the end specifically to take your questions. So go ahead and put them there. We also have a Jasper customer success manager Carissa on the call today. If you have specific questions for her. I want to do a quick intro of myself. My name is Loreal Lynch. As I mentioned, I'm the CMO of Jasper. Excited to bring this series to you. I'm actually new to Jasper, I've only been on board joined recently. I came from Stripe, the payments infrastructure company and prior to that spent six years at Salesforce.

So very passionate about AI and specifically I'm really excited to be here at Jasper building a platform for marketers and to be able to contribute to that. So with that I'm going to turn it over to Shane. Shane, maybe you can do a quick intro of yourself and talk about why you're interested in AI as well.

Shane Murphy Reuter: Great. Yeah. Hi everyone. As Loreal mentioned, I'm CMO Webflow and AI I think is passionate about it for two reasons. One, obviously personally as a head of marketing, any tools that can give marketing teams the power to do new things in a way that was maybe required a very advanced skill set previously is just really, really powerful.

So as a CMO, just generally I'm always on the hunt for new technologies that will sort of make my team more effective. But I also passionate about it because Webflow's mission is to bring development superpowers to everyone. So we founded on the idea that to build for the web was far too technical a discipline and that we wanted to build tools to allow anyone who wanted to build for the web to do that.

And we started with a very sort of no code, low code approach to allowing people development in a visual canvas, but the advancements in AI are perfectly aligned to that mission. And so, you know, I think about it not only from how does my team use AI, but also how Webflow as a product can better leverage AI. And actually we have a great integration with Jasper as a good example of how you can like leverage a tool like Jasper right within Webflow. So, yeah, really excited to be here to chat.

Loreal Lynch: Amazing. Yeah, that's great. Thank you. Thank you, Shane.

The Evolution of Marketing and the Role of AI

Loreal Lynch: And where I want to start is, you know, I know over the years there have been quite a bit of advancements in terms of marketing technology and we've had kind of different surges that have impacted the field. So from social media coming onto the scene and all the kind of advancements there and opening that as a channel, marketing automation, advancements in kind of marketing analytics. Where do you see kind of AI and this and this big, you know, the rise of AI fitting into the overall marketing technology landscape and what we've seen as kind of marketing leaders over the last several years?

Shane Murphy Reuter: Yeah, look, I'm a marketer, so I love a good story and I kind of see AI as like, you know, the three act structure in any sort of kind of movie or whatever. You've got the setup, you know, person's walking act two is like they fall in the hole. Act three, they get out of the hole. Right. I feel like marketing as a discipline has kind of been on this three act journey in that my expectation is that AI and more broadly, like kind of no code tools allow us to get into our Act 3.

And I give a bit more of what I mean by that, that now like act one was. That is actually when I started my career in Act 1. I'm going to age myself now, but I started when like marketing was all about brand, you know, kind of great copywriting, you know, the kind of the latter end of the Ogilvy days.

And back then your marketing discipline was like a relatively narrow one. You know, you had to have great insight that drove great copy and great art and you put an ad out in the world. And the media landscape was pretty simple back then. There wasn't like a ton of different TV channels in Ireland. I was, when I grew up, there was TV channels. There you go.

And so that was kind of act one and marketing was like this incredibly, you know, kind of creative discipline, amazing discipline. And then act two hit when we had this absolute explosion in the early 2000s of marketing technology. We've all seen the lumascapes of all the number of tools and it sort of promised this land of like making marketers more revenue accountable, opening up these different tools that allow them target better.

And for sure those tools allowed us to be more impactful in a lot of ways. But if you actually look at the marketing discipline, like CMOs are the shortest serving members on executive teams and it keeps declining, marketers overall actually aren't that successful as a discipline anymore, despite all these powers. And the reason in my mind for that is that marketing has become such a discipline of specialists that the core of marketing, of creating great stories that encourage somebody to take an action, has been lost in marketing.

And if you follow on Twitter, John Anthony Long, he does a lot of these like before and after ads like, of like car companies and before when they're really creative and now they just like these like over optimized things. And so I think that this technology, while in Act 2 gave us this great hope. It actually led to a lot of bad outcomes for marketers and marketing leaders.

And so now we're in Act 3 and I'll stop talking in a second, I'm waffling here, but we're now entering Act 3 where I think that we can actually harness this technology in a way that doesn't require all of these specialist skills in the same way as it did before and therefore truly democratizing the technology for marketers, allowing us get back to the core of what makes great marketing, which is like truly understanding the customer, crafting a compelling message and then allowing sort of more AI and no code tools to handle all the technology stuff that required specialisms before. So I'm really bullish on AI, but I don't think this is like, I think this is part of a continuum and really excited for what it can do for the success of marketing departments and leaders like you and me.

Loreal Lynch: Yeah, yeah, no, I think that's an interesting point on, you know, the marketing technology leading to so many specialists within the marketing organization.

AI and the Future of Marketing Teams

Loreal Lynch: And so with that I want to touch a bit on how the shape of the team will evolve with the onset of kind of AI and AI becoming more pervasive throughout the marketing organization. Because I think there's one school of thought where AI can actually lead to more specialists. Specialists that, you know, have to know the tools and have to understand how to build the prompts and use AI within the organization.

But I know that we at Jasper believe in what you're talking about, which is really the democratization of AI across the team. Everybody needing to have a baseline of knowledge on how to use it. What we've seen is that AI in the organizations that we see adopting it most successfully, it's a team sport. It's not something that a single person can do. It requires the know adoption across the entire team.

So what are your thoughts on kind of that, the marketing organization and how that will evolve, you know, as these, as these tools become more widely adopted?

Shane Murphy Reuter: Yeah, like I, I think I'll say two things on this. I think the, the first trend that we'll see is the collapsing of roles. And so the number of specialist roles that exist in marketing teams now will collapse down as access to the ability to use technology sort of democratizes. I'll give an example.

So Webflow, every other company I've worked at, to build for your website you needed a web designer and you need a web developer. Webflow, we just have our web designers are the developers who use Webflow. So we've now collapsed that previously two role into one.

Now that isn't through AI, it's through more like kind of a no code tool like Webflow. But if you cast your mind forward to how AI can impact that across the marketing org, I do think a lot of the roles will start to collapse down. Like even things like data analysis. Right now you need like specialist data analysis analysts within marketing. AI is extremely powerful in being able to look at data sets and pull out insights and those sorts of things.

And therefore do you truly need like a dedicated analyst or is that data readily available for marketing leadership? So I think we'll see overall a collapsing down to more generalists. Overall I think the long term ultimate outcome is. I love your team sport thing that you mentioned. As I mentioned in Act 1 in Marketing it was a team sport. You had somebody who's responsible for the strategy, who had the customer insight paired with somebody in copy, with somebody in art and a person in media, a small integrated team that did integrated marketing and then we exploded and became these extremely disconnected teams. I think that collapses back down again and you likely have you know, smaller integrated teams of maybe a strategist still, maybe somebody who is, still has that creativity, who is maybe leveraging AI to help come up with the copy in the art, etc.

But somebody who specialists there and then likely just somebody who is still the technologist who's like executing in channel but using AI to do that. And you could have like really powerful teams of like you know, three people or three types of roles able to execute marketing the way today you need 10 to 20 to do. And so yeah I think that that overall means that for any marketers coming up in their career, making sure they understand and are trained in the core skills of marketing would be really important.

Loreal Lynch: Yeah, I think you brought up an interesting point on kind of requiring fewer people to, to do the work. And I know that's a question that, that comes up a lot. I even see some, some comments on this in the chat right now, which is like, you know, is AI going to take our jobs as marketers? And, and I know my perspective on that is marketers.

And as a marketing leader, I'm sure you can, I'm sure this resonates with you. We're always short staffed. We're, we never have the resources that we need to do all of the work that we have on our plates. I think there's a stat from Gartner that marketing budgets are declining 15% year over year from, you know, you know, 9% of total to 7% of total or something like that.

And so my perspective is that AI tools can help us, can help be a force multiplier, so doing more with the team that you have. But I'm curious what your thoughts are on kind of efficiency and you know, is AI, are the AI robots going to, you know, take the jobs of marketers ultimately over the long haul?

Efficiency, Job Security, and AI in Marketing

Shane Murphy Reuter: Yeah, well, I think Sam Altman said that AI would automate 95 of what marketers do. I'm not, I'm not quite there. But the question is, are we coal miners or not?

And what I mean by that is the reason that the coal mining jobs went away is because there was no demand for coal mining, not because coal miners became more efficient. Every other technological advancement in history, and maybe somebody will come up with one and catch me, but where there is still a demand for the thing that the technology helps make more efficient has not led to a reduction in the number of people or the amount of that work that gets done. Again, using Webflow as an example, you could have argued that the demand for software and front end engineers would drop when things like Squarespace launched or Wix launched, or Webflow launched. 100% did not. It just meant that there was lowered the barrier of adoption to get a web presence and therefore the number of websites just increased dramatically.

And what likely will happen is, yeah, each marketer will become a lot more efficient, but it's likely that we do more. To your point, we're able to do more as a team. There's always more to do and likely there are a lot more companies founded that require marketing teams.

And because we become more efficient. So my sense of it is that yes, marketers will get much more efficient, but there's so much work and so many businesses that have been founded off the back of this that it will end up 99 incrementally more jobs, which is what we've seen, I think, through other advancements like this.

Loreal Lynch: Yeah, that makes sense. And something that you said earlier is sticking with me, which is I think a lot of times when we think about AI, we, we think about this, what we're talking about now, which is efficiency, doing more with less automated automation, things like that. But what I really, what I really appreciate about what you said earlier is that actually when you look at marketing over the long term, it's not so much just about making things faster and more efficient and, you know, scaling. It's really about strategy. It's about getting back to that creativity, to that marketing, you know, strategy, being able to focus more on that and using AI to enable that.

And so I'm curious, you know, what your vision is for this even within Webflow. Like, what do you, you know, do you have a vision of how you anticipate to where you're taking the team in terms of your own AI vision and roadmap?

Shane Murphy Reuter: Yeah, yeah, vision might be a strong word. I would say that I'm still trying to, like, I know this is funny because I'm on a, on a webinar for marketing. You set it up as like, you know, the future thinkers of AI say that like there's a little, I think everyone has a bit of imposter syndrome in this stuff where it's, it's so fast moving and emerging. Oh my God. Yeah, like, and you know, my.

So I would say no to vision, but yes to making sure that we are all on the front foot of how we can use AI. And like right now it's clear that, you know, generative AI is the kind of hot thing, right? Like, you know, and there are sort of three ways in my mind that you can use that. There's like marketing content, right? Which is right in Jasper's wheelhouse, right? More blog posts, more case studies, all that really help with content generation. I think another one which I thought was interesting use case, which I've heard a lot of people use and we started using internally, is using it for the generation of internal content.

So even for product marketers to like use it to help craft great positioning or great copy as well for like how you go and train the sales team on a product or whatever and then the third one I think, which is emerging more and more now is like what I kind of call workflow content, which is like, let's say somebody downloads a white paper and you can have the AI do research on the person that's download and then auto, auto generate an email response from sales for that person. And so right now I'd say the most use cases that, that we're actually actioning on are that kind of generative content in those ways. And you know, beyond that, I think it comes down to like, how will the technology advance? Like, obviously we also still use it within tools. Like one of the most useful. We ran a survey recently with, I can't remember the company, and the survey tool was using AI to like summarize the kind of some of the comments to pull out key themes and stuff like that I think would just become more and more pervasive, which is great.

So not necessarily a vision much as to say like, we just need to keep on top of where it's going and find spots we can use it. Obviously you all are like, you know, I assume at the front foot, I know you're like two, two days into the job, but like, yeah, how are you all thinking about using them?

Loreal Lynch: Well, yeah, like I mentioned, we do. We have seen, you know, in talking to our customers that it's less, I think when, I think when Jasper first started it was really about a single person within an organization and like a single use case. Like you mentioned, like blog, general, like generating a blog post or something like that. As we've evolved and as we've, you know, our customers have grown, we're working with kind of larger organizations with larger marketing teams. We've seen that it's much more about workflows, about optimizing and automating workflows.

So it's not so much just generating the blog post, it's, you know, when you, when you have a webinar, what's the entire workflow from start to finish and how can AI automate that entire process for the team? And so that's really what we've seen in working with our customers and what we're enabling with the platform and where we think kind of, at least in the immediate, you know, kind of short term where, where the industry or, you know, for marketing teams is going to. One thing that you mentioned a couple minutes ago is that nobody is really an expert when it comes to AI. I'm always wary when people send me like a LinkedIn request and they claim to be like an expert on a.

But the market is changing so fast that we're all kind of like experimenting with use cases within our own organizations. And so one of the questions that I had for you kind of as a follow up is with that being said and looking at AI as kind of this next frontier, has that changed what you look for in candidates, you know, when you are hiring and when you bring people on? And I, you know, I'm curious if you are thinking about that, like how do you assess, you know, how, you know, who you bring on for different roles?

Hiring, Skills, and AI Readiness

Shane Murphy Reuter: Yeah, I would say I may be about to contradict myself a little bit here because we did hire somebody at Webflow to be a dedicated person focused on finding opportunities across the business to leverage AI.

Loreal Lynch: Yeah, yeah.

Shane Murphy Reuter: So there is a. And, and the reason that contradicts myself is that I've just described another specialism and I'm actually curious what group, what, what group does that sit in within your marketing team?

Loreal Lynch: So it's, it's actually sits centrally within our Webflow Labs team. Okay.

Shane Murphy Reuter: Yeah. And, but the place that they're first focused on is marketing.

Loreal Lynch: Okay.

Shane Murphy Reuter: And you know, when I talked about this sort of collapsing of roles and this and, and moving back to generalism, I'm talking multi years here. You know, I, there's in the short term, as it's changing and moving so fast, having somebody who is waking up, you know, in the morning and really identifying those opportunities I think is quite, is quite powerful just as the kind of industry settles. And so we've done that.

And you know, my advice to folk out there, you may not have the headcount to hire somebody, but even if you do things like hackathons within the teams where we, we've been planning to do a hackathon within marketing on like spend a day where each team has to come up, like here are the ways that we can leverage AI within our workflows. So I think just generally there's that. But to answer your question more directly, like, you know, are we changing what we're looking for in across the team on skill sets? I think the one thing that we are getting ahead of is just making sure that across the team the core skills and marketing are there. If we were to hire an email marketer, let's say a couple of years ago, maybe we'd been mostly focused on their Marketo skills or like how are they, how good are they? More the marketing operation side of like, you know, creating triggers for different types of emails and those sorts of things.

And don't be wrong. That's still important, but increasing. We're like, okay, but they also have to have great kind of core marketing skills of, well, ultimately what we're trying to get this person to do and how to create great copy and compelling messaging in order to push through those emails.

Because ultimately that is the thing that won't be automated away and the other things will. And so, yeah, I suppose I'm coming back to the same point again, which is that skill sets are so, so key and starting to hire for it now and, you know, praying for it. It's going to be important.

Loreal Lynch: Yeah, yeah. And I would say, like, in a sense, something that I've always looked for in candidates is just an intellectual curiosity and, you know, someone who just wants to be to cur. Curious to figure out new things to learn.

And so I think that kind of holds true even with this, you know, emergence of AI as you're looking for. People like it. Like we said, no one is really an expert yet, but people that can roll up their sleeves, kick the tires, try new things, develop new use cases, spin up, you know, new ways to use these tools I think is still something that I would be looking for probably even more in candidates as we look to look to build the team.

Shane Murphy Reuter: That's great. Love that.

Q&A: Adoption, Differentiation, and Measuring Success

Loreal Lynch: I know we have, we wanted to reserve some time for Q and A. So if you, if you have questions, I'll, I'll pick out a couple that I see in the chat and feel free to add more. But one question that came in is how should I approach testing AI with a team who's skeptical and hesitant to use it? Any thoughts on that? Shane?

Shane Murphy Reuter: Oh, wow, interesting. You know, that's it. I suppose the question my mind would be like, skeptical, where I would start with a very clear use case rather than saying, hey, we need to.

And there's a lot of the, like, hey, we all got to use AI. And I think a lot of people like are rolling their eyes as if it's like, like, okay, what does that mean? But I think if you go to your team and say, hey, here's like three to five ways I've seen other companies do it and we want to test it there.

Then like, if somebody's going to push back on that, that just seems like maybe they shouldn't be in the role. I'm trying to manage them through that, but I think it's about identifying more specifics around, hey, let's, here's a clear use case. Let's go test it here. As opposed to a broad statement around AI.

Loreal Lynch: Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. And I guess that kind of a similar question that's a follow up to that is more about for marketing leaders. What advice do you have for marketing leaders who are grappling with, with AI adoption?

And I think a lot of CMOs are getting pressure from boards from their CEOs on kind of getting out there and starting to use it because I think it has such relevant applications in, in marketing. So what advice do you have, you know, for others to kind of get out there and get started?

Shane Murphy Reuter: Yeah, I would say this is beyond AI, but I think as CMOs it's like very easy for us to assume that like somebody else is responsible for the detailed knowledge and like you know, the Webflow marketing teams, like 90 people. Be very easy for me to be like, I don't need to get close to it. Well, I'll give that to somebody else. I think it's absolutely our job to be on the forefront of this.

And so, you know, that could mean like for example, I follow Kieran Flanagan over at HubSpot is doing a ton of like, he is like deep in AI. So I'm listening to a podcast, I'm on his like email list really just trying to keep on top of like what are the. So that I'm not reliant on somebody else that I actually know what are the, the top things that folk are doing.

So I would start there for sure. And then I, the other thing I would do is, as I talked about earlier is, you know, finding formal ways. Like marketing is so busy, it'd be very easy for the team just like not to leverage this. Right. They would just, I'm so busy, I just gotta like get this stuff out the door. I don't.

So how do you create space for that? And like we talked about a hackathon for example. Or maybe it needs to be one of your OKRs. Like we actually have it now as one of our company levels.

Loreal Lynch: Oh, you do?

Shane Murphy Reuter: Yeah.

Loreal Lynch: What is, what is. What is the OKR?

Shane Murphy Reuter: It's like around shipping use cases.

Loreal Lynch: Or is it like, is there a KPI associated with it?

Shane Murphy Reuter: It's, we're working through that now. It's for H2, but it's become an AI first company. And so it's you know, of like how we leverage it in our product, but also how we leverage it through the company.

So I think it's like making sure that this isn't like the key thing you want to do is find a way to make sure the default is that people won't change their behavior. That is like human nature. So how do you shift the default to be like, no, no, we're going to grab this. That might be that you carve out time, as I said, with a hackathon. It could be that it has to be an OKR. It could be that that's just a personal goal that you've set for everybody in your team to come back with, like, by the end of the month. Here's what I've learned and I've identified as the top three ways I can leverage it.

But you got to like, you, this won't happen by default, right? You have to like, make it happen.

Loreal Lynch: Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. A couple of the questions that I'm getting here are related to the, the content generation piece and how so much more content can be generated with, with AI. And I think we've, we've read the stats on how much web content will be AI generated within the next few years.

And so one of the questions is how do you differentiate if all of these companies are going to be ramping up their content generation? And I think, like, my perspective is that this is actually an opportunity for you to differentiate your brand more because kind of your focus on how, how to automate away some of those tasks and be able to focus more on kind of like your brand voice your campaigns, how you're going to stand out. But I'm curious to get your thoughts on, you know, how, how the proliferation of content generated will, will ultimately impact a company's ability to stand out.

Shane Murphy Reuter: Yeah, like, I think what's going to happen first is that SEO style content, and I think it's something in the chat here talks about this, but like SEO type content and like top 5 ways to do XYZ is just going to like explode and then the search engines are going to have to like crash the rankings and those things. And so it's to your point. This is an opportunity for brands to truly grab, have a unique point of view and create content that truly adds value.

So I'll give an example. When I was at Zoom Info, we published a book that was 100, 100 go to Marketplace. Our whole thing was about go to market automation.

And so we actually wrote out a hundred different, what we call plays, which were ways that you could automate a part of your go to market machine. AI cannot come up with that is the core part of our content strategy. They also, AI right now certainly couldn't write that. You need true experts writing that. It can absolutely help in speeding up the generation of that content.

But we had to have that unique point of view, we had to have that unique knowledge and we had to be really consistent that when we were in market, that's what we talked about all the time, automation of your go to market. And so I think it, again, it comes back to what we talked about at the start, which is like the core skill of a marketer is like to have that point of view, right? Your content has to have a point of view, your brand has to have a point of view.

And it's going to be some time before AI, if ever, can develop that for you and develop the true expertise to have true thought leadership in market. And so yeah, I don't think that goes away. I just, I think the SEO type content goes away.

Loreal Lynch: Yeah, I think that makes sense. And then one of the other questions here, maybe this would be the last one because I know we're short on time, but somebody asks, and maybe this goes back to your putting this in the OKRs. What are the KPIs and metrics that marketing leaders use to measure the success of their AI driven initiatives?

And I think this is an interesting one because I mean, in a sense I think these KPIs could be similar to the other KPIs for the rest of the team. It could be, you know, number of engagements, it could be pipeline generated from these, you know, AI driven initiatives. It could also be maybe in the early days when there's experimentation, just the ship, ship, like shipping a use case, getting it live, that's a win, you know, if you're, if you're early in the game, but curious how you guys are thinking about this at Webflow as you put this onto your OKRs officially.

Shane Murphy Reuter: Yeah, again, like, this comes down to like, AI is a technology in and of itself. It's a, it's a tool, not an outcome. And so we will define different OKRs based upon the actual initiatives that we're applying it to.

So for example, if we were using it to generate our ad copy, we would expect an uplift in the conversion that ad copy. However, right now the main thrust of it for us is about improving efficiency. And so we will have to look at like, hey, how many, how many blog posts can the team ship per month and how does that change based upon leveraging AI, that sorts of thing. Or like things like on the, I talked about the automated response from sales. How much time does that free up for the SDR, do conversion rates improve or not?

And so the measure is going to be defined by how you're leveraging AI. It's ultimately a tool. So there's not like one answer there. It comes down to like, hey, we've identified these five top things we want to go do and then we measure them off the back of that.

Loreal Lynch: Yeah. So I think it does kind of. Yeah. It just depends on this specific use case and lining it up with ultimately with the use cases.

Closing Remarks

Loreal Lynch: Well, it looks like we are at time for today, but this has been our time went by so fast. Clearly there's a lot to cover here and a lot of interest in this topic. I really appreciate you joining us today, Shane, and hearing your thoughts on the industry. Really respect a lot of your opinions here.

So thank you so much for joining us and thank you everyone who tuned in. Like I mentioned, this is the first of many, so we do have a follow up next month and we're looking forward to having you continue to tune in for these.