
TRS 013: Mathew Sweezey Principal of Marketing Insights at Salesforce
We all know that the world is changing, but some how businesses are always last to receive the message. As consumers, our expectations of technology have vastly increased over just a handful of years. So why do business leaders bristle at calls for change?
Consumers expect three things when dealing online: that the moment is real time, that it’s contextual, and that it’s an experience, and that’s why Mathew Sweezey of Salesforce suggests that the time for a CMO has come and gone. We are now in an age of the CXO, Chief Experience Officer, who is in charge of delivering those three needs to the masses. It should be noted that Mat’s no mystic; there’s no crystal ball living beneath his desk. In stead, his vision for the future of marketing is derived from data.
Want to hear more from Mat? He will be attending Insight Marketing Conference right here in Lancaster, PA on September 25th. Get your tickets online at insightlanc.com.
Resources
Get your tickets to Insight Marketing Conference, September 25, 2019
Mathew’s Sweezey’s book Marketing Automation for Dummies
Mathew’s podcast Electronic Propaganda Society
The Experience Economy by Joseph Pine and James Gilmore
Twitter: @msweezey
Read Full Transcription
Marcus: Hey, marketers and business leaders, and welcome to an exciting new episode of The Revenue Stream from Web Talent Marketing. As a reminder, I’m Marcus Grimm, the Chief Growth Officer for Web Talent Marketing, and this is the next episode of our multipart series where I’m interviewing other speakers for this year’s Insight Lanc Conference right here in Lancaster. Now look, if you don’t know about Insight Lancaster, well it’s on September 25th to be exact, and on that date, marketers from around the US will be descending right here into Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the oldest inland city in the United States, for a one day event, full of fun and education. This is going to be the fourth year of Insight Lanc, and we’ll be bringing together some of the sharpest minds in marketing. And for the next several episodes of The Revenue Stream, we will be speaking to many of them, including today’s guests who actually is going to be the closing keynote.
Marcus: Now before I introduce this speaker, I do want to direct you to insightlanc.com. That’s insight-L-A-N-C dot com where you can find out even more about the event. And as we release this particular podcast, I think are still going to be sitting at that crazy early bird price of only $175. That is a bargain given this lineup. It’s a bargain even if we just had today’s speaker on it. You don’t want to miss it.
Marcus: So today’s guest on The Revenue Stream, in fact, actually is Mat Sweezey, Mat as the Principal of Marketing Insights for Salesforce. That’s right: salesforce.com. Mat was a pioneer of the marketing automation space, and he is respected as one of the top minds on the future of marketing. Consummate thinker and writer, Mat’s work has been featured in Forbes, The Guardian, AdAge, The Economist, numerous other publications. His second book is called The Context Revolution. It’s due out this year, and it’s being published by the Harvard Business Press. I actually met Mat back in 2009 or 2010. Back then he was working for a little startup company called Pardot, which we actually used at a previous agency that I was working with, and I was one of the customers who got to speak at that first users conference right there in Atlanta. Well, since then, Pardot has exploded. Pardot was acquired by Salesforce. Mat now works for Salesforce. He’s continued to be a major presence, not just in marketing automation, but in all things marketing. Hey Mat, welcome to The Revenue Stream.
Mathew: Hey, thanks for having me.
Marcus: Now my first question, Mat, is everyone’s got an origin story. I remember in Atlanta in– was it 2009? The first user conference?
Mathew: I can’t remember.
Marcus: It was a blast, and I remember I get down there and they’re going over the agenda. Everyone’s saying, “Wow, wait until you hear Mat Sweezey talk. Wait until to hear Mat Sweezey talk.” And it was great, and that was the first that I was aware of you. But everybody has an origin story. So what’s yours? Where’d you go to college? What did you major in, and did you think you’d end up here today?
Mathew: Yeah, well it’s my origin’s story is kind of funny. So, I’ll kind of walk you through. I went to college and earned a C in Accounting. And so at the University of Georgia, the accounting class was the weed out class for the business school. So they weren’t going to allow me into the business school. So I went to the school of agriculture to take my classes. So I have an Agricultural Business degree– most people don’t know that.
Mathew: And then I got into the real world. Did some, you know, did a lot of different things. Sold copy machines, sold condos, and then I did my first startup. I had started my first startup at the age of, like, 25. Ran that for a few years. We did an online lead arbitrage system. It was way before its time, and I lost a lot of money and had to shut it down. I was pretty close with the Atlanta startup scene. Back then, there was only like 12 or 14 of us. It was a very small startup scene in Atlanta at the time. So I talked and chatted with my friends, and there’s this guy named David Cummings who had a startup called Pardot. And I asked my buddies like, “Hey man, I was like, is he hiring?” He goes, “Sure…” So I chatted with David, and that was on a Saturday when I asked. Then I was hired at Monday at 11 o’clock. I was employee number 13 at Pardot; I was the second sales guy, and that’s really kind of where it all started. And that’s kind of what introduced me to essentially automation and an entirely new way of thinking about marketing. From that, that’s just kind of where everything just kind of started to come together. I’ve always had a fascination with marketing my entire life. Ever since I was a child, I would start companies, made advertisements for my companies, made all kinds of stuff. I just loved it.
Marcus: And you’re still there, and Pardot is still growing. That is awesome. And I love that story about only “pulled a C” in accounting there. Hey, it worked out okay for you! Now when you come to Insight Lanc, we’re going to be looking forward to hearing your perspective on the future of marketing. It’s the closing keynote speech. And I kind of get the sense, Mat, that you’re not necessarily one of those crystal ball guys. I’m sure there’s going to be some ideas that are really forward thinking, but I almost get the idea that some of what you’re going to be talking about is basically connecting the dots to things that we’re already seeing that just aren’t widely distributed yet. Am I right, or are we going to be talking about stuff that’s 50 years in the future?
Mathew: Oh, no. So when you talk about the future, you have to realize that not everyone’s future’s the same.
Marcus: Right.
Mathew: And that’s your starting point. You know, the William Gibson quote, “The future’s here; it’s just not equally distributed.” And whenever I talk the future, I talk about two versions of the future. There’s the near term and the far term. So the near term future is essentially we just need to look at what are the high performers doing. And then when we break down the numbers, high performers, when I say high performers they’re high performing marketing organizations, really only account for about 16% of the total. So for 84% of marketers and brands, just simply knowing and doing what the high performers are doing is your next three to five years. When we want to look at where are the major trends and we want to get ahead of it, we can look at 2025 and beyond.
Mathew: And yes, we can get into some crazy stuff. I tend to save the really big radical things for my books and publications. It just doesn’t do as much good to talk for an hour about, you know, what’s going to be here in 2025 and theoretically get into these ideas. It’s much more beneficial for us to talk about the near term and then just sprinkle in a little of the far term. But I definitely agree. I don’t try to propose it that I’m going to show you a crystal ball that you’ve never seen. Not in this presentation.
Marcus: And it’s a great point that it’s going to look like new and unproven to you if you’re in one of those 84% of the companies that isn’t in the top 16%. So that makes a lot of sense. Along those lines, we all talk about the coming of AI and how AI is on the horizon, but one of your key tenants is that we already are living what you call a “post AI consumer world.” That was a new phrase for me. What does “post AI consumer” mean?
Mathew: Yeah, it’s new phrase for everyone; I got to make it up! So we think about it this way. As brands and businesses, we think about artificial intelligence as a brand-side application. Something that we need to buy, something that we need to adopt to change how we do business. We very rarely think about it as a consumer-side application, but the reality is it’s consumers side long before it ever is or will be a brand side. And we need to think about it a very specific way, and I’m just going to kind of lay it out in the four key theories. Breakout any customer interaction that is digital. There is not a digital interaction that is not managed or curated by AI. Meaning that the entire consumer’s life: a Google search, completely AI response, your email inbox managed for you by artificial intelligence, your social feed. It is not a chronological feed. It as a contextual feed completely managed by AI. Websites: their increasing their use of artificial intelligence on the websites this year by 257%. That’s just an increased this year. There is not an interaction in the modern world that is not mediated by artificial intelligence, meaning for us to reach the modern consumer, we first have to break through intelligence. And if we don’t realize that, we won’t change the ways that we fundamentally structure our marketing.
Mathew: And this is what it boils down to: traditionally marketing has stood on a foundation of attention first, right? You have to grab somebody’s attention. The reality is that that’s completely flawed, and the reason it’s completely flawed is because artificial intelligence doesn’t optimize for attention and in fact filters out attention seeking media in favor of contextual media. And so that is the big point. For us to actually reach the “post AI consumer,” which is all consumers, we have to first drop the idea that we need to steal their attention, hold their attention, or grabbed their attention and realize we must focus on the context of the market.
Marcus: That that is a hugely, big idea. Now with the AI kind of greasing the rails of marketing, then that leads us to one of your other things that you talk about, which is this new consumer mandate, which I guess is exactly what consumers are demanding from brands. Correct?
Mathew: Yeah. And the new consumer mandate, it’s not just from brands. We need to remove the idea that it’s what they expect from us, what they expect from a moment, what they expect from an experience and whoever recreate that is who they engage with and then may be created by a brand and may be created by an individual, may be created by the influence or whoever can create the most contextual experience of that moment wins. And it’s really broken down to three things. They expect in any moment three key things: 1) That the moment is fast, real time is obviously something we talk about all the time. 2) It must be contextual, which means that it must help them achieve their goal at the moment, and when you start breaking that down we as individuals need to realize that what is a consumer’s goal per moment changes by moment and channel. People don’t go to social media to read your white paper. They go to either self validate their own self, achieve societal validation, or escape. We need to realize what those goals are. And the third thing is that we must focus on this notion that it is an experience, right? Those are the really the big three key things that we must focus on.
Marcus: It sounds like things are perhaps a lot more complicated than 10 years ago when we had these simple marketing funnels. It’s really not that simple, isn’t it?
Mathew: No, it’s not at all. And I think that’s one of the things that we’re going to have to realize is the basic notion that we have of marketing used to be as simplistic model. A simplistic idea costs very low amount of money, right? Two percent of gross revenue was what we used to spend, and that was during the golden era of marketing. That was the idea that we came about during that point in time. But I mean, many of you may not follow Mary Meeker or know who she is, but she’s been listed as one of the smartest people in technology. In fact, one of the top 10 by fortune, one of the 77 most powerful women in the world by Forbes. She’s with Kleiner Perkins, if anyone’s familiar with Kleiner Perkins. She helped lead the IPO for Netscape and Google. She puts out an internet trends report every year and she just put out the last one, I believe it was last week or the week before. And she talks about a lot of these things. And we need to realize, we are moving in a vastly different direction, and we must kind of pick up on those things. And that’s one of the big key things she talked about.
Marcus: That’s huge. You know, this all sounds very big, but it’s also fairly heavy. What are some tactical implications about what you’re talking about? How is this new future going to integrate how marketing integrates with sales?
Mathew: Yeah, so essentially there’s a lot of things wrapped up in this. So the point I just tried tried to make was that, Mary talks about the bifurcation of digital transaction channels. And so the old idea was there was one transaction channel. It was cash. Then we had cash and credit cards. Now if we look at transaction channels, 59% of all transaction channels are digital, and that’s spread across multiple different transaction possibilities. The same thing works across everything else, right? The idea of marketing is no longer that it’s a siloed department. In fact, it’s become the overarching primary, what would I call, the primary economic driver of all brands, removing the idea that products was the primary economic driver. And really where that comes down to is now marketing has to integrate and become the driver with everybody, right? So it’s not marketing pases leads to sales. Now Marketing and Sales have to collaborate together. What we find is that high performing marketing organizations are one and a half times more likely to integrate marketing and sales through account based marketing programs– basic stuff like that. You know, we think this is basic, but really it’s marketing now taking on a larger role, and it expands to every department.
Marcus: Which kind of gets you to, you know, I’ve heard you talk about this– and it probably scares a couple of the CMOs in your audiences. You’re almost kind of hinting that marketing as we know it is going to go away and this entire concept of a Chief Marketing Officer might go away. And I guess what you’re saying is, that role is going to go away because the new role’s going to be even more important. Is that what you’re saying?
Mathew: Yeah, completely, and that’s not the first time this has ever happened, right? So let’s first start with that one. The the notion of a CMO doesn’t come about until digital marketing comes about. Before the CMO, you had the VP of Sales and Marketing. CMO is a modern term that we created only in the past, I would say, decade or so since digital has really been a big thing. And in the future, the CMO is no longer the head of marketing. In fact, what we find is the head is going to be what’s called the Chief Experience Officer, CXO. And this was first proposed by Joseph Pine and his coauthor [James] Gilmore in their book The Experience Economy published first back in I believe 1999. It’s not a new idea, but as we find, radical ideas and marketing take about 15 years for them to be adopted.
Mathew: About 20 years ago– If you look at permission marketing from Seth Goden, it took about that long for all the brands to really understand the notion of permission, the idea of content, and the value exchange. But when we look at this notion of CXO, my favorite case in point is, if we look at Publicis– so if you’re not familiar with Publicis, Publicis is a massive conglomerate of media channels, ad agencies. They are the largest in the world, right? They run more campaigns than anyone else. They themselves have put a CXO in charge of their own marketing. That is now the head of their department, and they relay directly to the CEO. The role of the CXO– if we think about it this way, if the role of the CMO was to create the brand and generate leads, that still leaves every other interaction that the brand has with the consumer untouched by marketing.
Mathew: And what the real problem with that comes in is each silo department operates for its own goals, not for the goal of the customer experience. And if we realize that the modern definition of brand is no longer what the CMO creates, rather, it’s the sum of all the experiences that the consumer has with the brand. The sum of all experiences. If we believe now that brand is the sum of all experiences, it makes sense why we have to put a chief experience officer in place. Also, why we then have to expand the idea of marketing across the entire customer journey. Every interaction: service, sales, marketing, product. These are all touch points. These are all experiences. And if we don’t have somebody in charge of The Entire Experience, then it’s not going to be managed, and each silo will operate for its own goals. And that goal is not the experience, right? Sales is going to optimize for deals. Service and support will optimize for how quickly can they get you up the call/ how many calls do they have to field. But these are not experiential goals, right? So that’s why we see brands like Publicis putting the CXO in charge. And this is also happening across every vertical in every industry.
Marcus: And it’s at some level it’s a little bit logical because the reality is, as we all know, creating better experiences for your existing customers leads to more revenue from those existing customers. So it makes sense to try to optimize that experience, to truly deliver on the brand, not just for new customers but for existing ones.
Mathew: Yeah. I mean it’s not new knowledge to anybody that keeping a customer is more profitable than trying to gain a new one. But the mathematics and the notion of marketing has changed because we have better abilities to do these things in real time. We can prove that an increased user experience increases the bottom line by multiple– Let me give you a really simple case study. So at Salesforce we have the Trailhead community, which is essentially a user community where we have a lot of people that can go on, anyone in the world, become a member, and they can get certifications/ training in lots of different things. The average person that goes on and becomes a member of Trailhead, if they’re a current customer, what we find is they spend twice as much and they stay a customer four times as long.
Marcus: Wow.
Mathew: Let me repeat twice as much for four times as long. There is no branding or marketing campaign– we cannot create a message strong enough to drive that result. That result is only possible by a collaboration between marketing and support. And when we look at that and we say, “Oh, that is how we increased and grow the bottom revenues!” That is then when we can see the role of the CXO, we can kind of start to see this idea of marketing as a collaboration across all departments, and really the revenue impact of that. And it’s far greater than just putting new people into the funnel.
Marcus: Right, absolutely. One of the other tactics that you talk about in your speaking is we talk about this whole idea of “automation.” But you’re introducing this idea, what you’re calling “decentralized automation.” How’s that different?
Mathew: Yes, so it’s fundamentally different. Let’s also take two steps back. So the first book I wrote was for Wiley. It was called Marketing Automation for Dummies; they had me write that for them back in 2013. Wiley actually reached out and asked me to write it for them. So in 2013 when we created marketing automation, marketing automation starts in 1999 with Eloqua. We first need to realize that. So at this point in time, marketing automation is a single tool. That tool has its own data feeds, right? It collects its own data. You program the automations inside of this one tool, and this one tool then executes those automations. At that point in time, there were very few pieces of technology. In fact, I think the earliest that Scott Brinker actually starts to track the size of the marketing automation landscape is in 2011. In 2011 there were only 150 marketing tools. And in 2018 there are 45 times more tools. Think about that. Forty-five times more tools in seven years.
Mathew: Now what that means is the average brand is now using 15 different tools, right? We see some brands like Cisco using 30 tools in their marketing stack. Each one of those tools has its own automation inside of it. And the idea of how we create better experiences is not just by putting all that data into a marketing automation platform. The idea is how do we automate experiences across the entire journey in different tools needs to come into play. So this idea of “decentralized automation” means we can’t expect that just a tool is the central automation platforms. Because every tool has automation. We have to make sure that you can connect all those automations together, and that is what decentralized automation is.
Marcus: And obviously that tech stack– You’re going to make the decisions need for your industry, for your brand, based on your budgets. And I’m going to ask you a tactical question, here. From a product development standpoint, is Pardot paying more attention right now to how to integrate with these other tools as opposed to maybe 15 years ago when we would add more features? Now is it all about the interoperability of these systems?
Mathew: Yeah, I mean it’s both. If you look at the Salesforce platforms, they’re massively growing ecosystems with more and more and more possibilities for you to connect and connect tools across. So yes, very much so. It’s all about the connectivity, bringing more data in and bringing more execution points out. Correct.
Marcus: If we take a look at all these decentralized automated tools, can you give us an example of what one might look like in action?
Mathew: Yeah, so don’t think of these centralized automation as a tool. Think of it more or less as a new way of thinking about marketing. About how do we create the best experiences at any moment, at any point in time. There’s really good examples, right? So Airbnb is probably the easiest example to look at, right? So Airbnb starts– and when Airbnb starts, they don’t use any advertisements at all. So what they did is the following: they use decentralized automations. So the two problems that Airbnb had when they started was, first, how do we get listings right onto the platform? And then two, how do we get people to then rent those listings? And to do that, they use two different decentralized automations. First automation: they create a bot to essentially scan Craigslist. They pull out all of the listings, and then they have an automation that did an if then. If this, then do this.
Mathew: And then it sent back to those individuals a personalized email that said, “Hey, we love your listing. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with Airbnb, we’re Yada, Yada, Yada.” That was the first step, right? That was an automation. There is no marketing automation platform involved in this. The second: they then have to get people back to the site. So they build another automation to take all of the listings on their site and repost them back to Craigslist. And that was the second automation. That’s how they grow. That’s how they started. And so it has nothing to do with this idea of a single automation platform. Rather, it’s the idea of how do we connect automations together at scale. So what does this mean for the modern brand? Let’s think about it really simply.? Let’s say that you a product and let’s say you have just released a new product or a new feature of your product, right?
Mathew: Well, we can now use one tool to essentially find who are the new users of that product. When they open the product, automatically pop up an NPS survey. That’s a tool in itself, right? We then have that survey run. We then get the results back from that survey. We then need to connect who that individual was to the user. We then need to think, “Okay, well all of those people that had high NPS scores, let’s then the next time they come back, pop up an invitation to our community or ask them for a review.” Those are two completely different tools, two completely different channels. Or for all the people that had a very low NPS score, the next time they come back, let’s pop up a live chat with an individual helping walk them through or an article to the FAQ. That’s six different tools that have six different execution points on multiple different channels but all take place at one point in time.
Marcus: That is amazing. What’s really, I think, cool for the marketers out there is the ability to cobble together these tools for that exact brand experience they’re trying to deliver on. Let me ask you about one specific tool. I noticed in your writing and in your talks, you mentioned chatbots, and you’re pretty bullish on those. And in my own experiences, I feel like I’m not being blown away by them and I’m feeling like they haven’t delivered the way that I want them to. I’m curious why you think I might feel that way and why you think things are going to get better as it relates to chatbots?
Mathew: Pretty easy answer. I’m going to break this down into two. So why do you have a bad experience? Well, that’s probably because the marketers who set those up just didn’t know what they were doing. Let’s be honest here. There’s a difference between what the consumers want, what the technology can actually deliver, and then how brands are actually using that. So, yes. What consumers want is instant, real time. So when we run the data– and I run a study every year about what consumers want from chatbots– there’s a lot of funny things going on, right? So when we asked consumers, “Would you rather engage with a chatbot or a human?” They resoundingly say human. But when we say what are the benefits to chatbots, they say 24/7 support. They say getting the answers to questions. Getting answers to simple questions. Getting the answers to complex questions. Getting connected to the correct person as fast as possible.
Mathew: They see chatbots better than really any other method to do those things. Really any other method. The funny part is most people don’t know when they’re talking to a chatbot or when they’re talking to a live chat, actual person. Here’s all they want. They want real time, they want it fast. They want it accurate, and they want it human. They don’t care what format that is done by, but chatbots give brands the fastest, most powerful ways to do those three things. The problem comes in with how they program those things, right? Just like social media. Social media is phenomenal. Am I’m blown away by most brands use of social media? No! Does that mean social media in itself is bad and we shouldn’t be bullish on it? The complete opposite. It just means we need more. Use it.
Marcus: Boy, that’s a dynamite answer! Everything that you’re talking about here, at an individual level, all these things are interesting. The concept of a post-consumer world, decentralized automation, chatbots. But when I add all this up, you kind of put out an idea that’s relatively simple, which is, when I add up all these things together, the result might look like the death of the traditional website as we know it.
Mathew: Yeah, completely. I mean everything is changing, and it’s constantly changing. We need to be very realistic with ourselves that nothing that we’ve ever known or that we do know will sustain into the future. Change kills a lot of things. And the website is constantly iterating, right? When we first started, we didn’t even do SEO on websites. They were just a simple landing page that looked like catalogs. We essentially took our yellow page advertisements and put them as a website, but we must realize the “modern” website is nothing like it looks, even now. It’s going to be completely artificially intelligent. It’s very likely going to be a complete conversational interface, meaning that you won’t scan through and try to find your way through. Rather you will be guided through via a chatbot or an artificially intelligent aspect of that website. It may not even be a website at all. We have a lot of brands that are completely starting out, only have Facebook Messenger. Think about that. There are entire travel agencies that only exists inside of Facebook Messenger where they don’t have a website. You book your entire thing through a conversation in Messenger.
Marcus: Kind of amazing when you think about it. Fifteen years ago we’d make fun of those brands. How can you exist without a website?! And what you’re suggesting is, in the future, quite simply.
Mathew: You may not even have to have a website, but you will have to have something that’s digital, something that’s easily accessible and something that helps the consumer achieve their goal at the moment. And that’s the key thing. When we look at websites and we asked, “What is the consumer’s goal at the moment,” most websites fail. And the simple answer as to how I can state that; it’s simple. The average page views per visitor session across websites is 1.7. Meaning that I a consumer doesn’t even go to the second page of a website. And what can we infer from that? Well, they don’t get what they’re looking for, and so they leave. Or it was so accurate that they don’t need to go to a second page. There’s ways you can answer that, but I’d say the first is more likely.
Marcus: Yeah, and if you’ve got low page views, then you would just take a look at your conversion rates to figure out if you’re doing it really well or are you doing it not well at all.
Mathew: Yeah. Yes, I agree.
Marcus: So a question for you. These are really, really big ideas. I can see all of this happening in applications where I’ve got big budgets, I’ve got big tech stacks, and I’ve got big data. How do you think– and I can even think about this as it relates to marketing automation these days where I have a lot of customers on marketing automation. But a lot of these technologies don’t always downscale into the small or medium sized businesses. So when you think about this big concept that you’re speaking about, “The Future of Marketing,” do you think these ideas are going to be more easily adapted by the small and medium sized players, or how do you see that playing out?
Mathew: That’s an interesting question. I don’t think size has anything to do with it. I think appetite for change actually has more to do with it. We see brands that are able to change quicker, and it doesn’t matter the size. But whoever can change the quickest, is who wins. So size doesn’t matter. Let’s be honest, the biggest brands, the fortune 500 list, is constantly in flux. Size is not generally an indicator of success or long term success. You are big: period. It doesn’t equal your future. So the idea that, yes, some of this may cost money. A lot of this may be a different idea, but a lot of these tools and technologies are free. There’s a decentralized application called If Then, Then That, completely free to make your own formulas. You don’t have to be a big brand to do these things. You just have to, one, understand the need for change and, two, have an appetite for it. That’s all that’s required.
Marcus: Yeah, I think that’s really well said. We’re nearing the end of the program, but I do want to make a pivot at this point because one of the things that I believe is that guys like yourselves– you make it a point to eat your own dog food and to experiment and to try new things. And a lot of what we talked about today, I learned from your podcast The Electronic Propaganda Society. A guy like you could do a podcast every week or even more often! But when you decided to do this, you kind of said, “No, I’m not gonna do that. I’m going to put together a body of work in this nine-part thing. How did that come together?
Mathew: A lot of things. So I just feel that we as brands don’t necessarily break out and do radical things all that often. So I wanted to break out and do something radical. And that was my idea. So I tried to do everything different. So rather than having lots of podcasts, one coming out every week or one coming out every month, I did something vastly different. I created essentially created a series. It’s a mini series. It’s already produced. The entire thing is already out there. There will be no more. It essentially follows along a lot of the theories and talk tracks that I’m writing about in my upcoming book for Harvard, and I just get to share a lot of the different things. And I just get to be as radical as I want. I love the format. I love the medium. So the answer to why is it different? I just felt that different was needed. I felt that we as brands needed some kind of inspiration to see what is possible past what we currently do.
Marcus: Outstanding. All right, marketers and business leaders! Well, we’re very near the end of our program, which means we have reached what many people say is their favorite part of The Revenue Stream. This is in fact The Marketing Minute with Mat Sweezey from Salesforce. Mat, are you ready, sir?
Mathew: Let’s do it!
Marcus: All right. Let’s talk about your cell phone. Apple or android?
Mathew: Apple.
Mathew: Ok, you’re going out for lunch. Are you taking Don Draper, Elon Musk or Steve jobs.
Mathew: Oh, shit. Let’s take, Elon. He’s more fun.
Marcus: That’s actually funny. We had a speaker on last week who said it would be the most awkward of the three, but I think I’d learned the most. All right. If I take a look at your computer screen right now, ad blocker or no?
Mathew: No.
Marcus: Oh, tell me more!
Mathew: I don’t use an ad blocker because I like to see how shitty some of the ads are.
Marcus: Outstanding. All right. How about– Boy, we talked a lot about formats. For you, sir, Facebook or LinkedIn?
Mathew: Personally, Facebook. Professionally LinkedIn.
Marcus: All right. There you go. Good answer. And finally, if we were to take a look at your television viewing habits, are you in fact a cable-holic or a cord cutter?
Mathew: I don’t own a TV.
Marcus: Oh, outstanding! So the answer for that would be podcast, right?
Mathew: Haha, yeah. I guess Netflix on my phone? I don’t know.
Marcus: Outstanding. Hey, Mat, I really appreciate you joining us today on the program. I’m gonna wrap this up by promoting the Insight Lanc website, but where can people learn more about Mat Sweezey?
Mathew: You can simply follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. That’s pretty much the two places I engage the most.
Marcus: Outstanding. Well, Hey, Mat, I really appreciate you coming to the program today. Folks, that’s Mat Sweezey from Salesforce. He’s going to be the keynote speaker this year at Insight Lanc, again that’s Insightlanc.com, on September 25th. And you’ve been listening to The Revenue Stream from Web Talent Marketing; I’m Marcus Grimm.