Benjamin Ard00:00 — Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Mark. Mark, welcome to the show.
Mark Boothe00:05 — Hey, Ben, thanks for having me.
Benjamin Ard00:06 — Yeah, Mark, I'm excited. This is going to be a fun conversation. But before we dive in, let's get to know you a little bit. Let's share a little bit about you to the audience. If you don't mind introducing yourself, it'll be great for everyone to know who you are.
Mark Boothe00:18 — Yeah, I'm Mark Boothe. I'm the proud dad of four beautiful little humans and a beautiful wife. I'm a CMO at Domo. I am a marketing nerd. Like I am the guy who literally reads business books for fun. I like to think of it as my sport, but I'm also a massive fan of sports. I'm a huge BYU football fan, massive RSL soccer fan, big Utah Jazz fan. Hopefully we turn things around in the next little bit. That's a little bit about me.
Benjamin Ard00:46 — I love it. Very cool. Well, Mark again, thanks for taking the time today. We're going to talk about a subject that everyone is thinking about: AI plus humans. What does that look like in marketing? All of that kind of fun stuff. So Mark, how are you using AI today? What are the advantages? Where is it making an impact in your marketing world?
Mark Boothe01:06 — Yeah, so top level, for anybody that's listening, if you have not already dug in very deeply to how you can use AI, like it's not a you better hurry, it's you're far behind and really late. I luckily was pushed and persuaded towards bringing somebody on a while ago. So I own both the marketing function and then the account development function at Domo. And I have had for a little bit an individual both on the marketing team and on the account development team whose almost entire focus is AI. How do we use AI? How do we leverage AI? How do we get more out of every single human? How do we make them more impactful by giving them the tools and the technology that they need to be able to be not one X of themselves, but two X, three X, four X, five X. That's the power of AI. You know, is AI taking jobs? Yes, it is for sure without question. You've seen it countless times. You've also seen stories like, you know, things that you might see on LinkedIn about Salesforce, maybe regretting so many people that were let go or whatever else. And it's like, be smart. Use it to help the humans do better work. There are things that AI can do better than humans by a mile. So stop getting in the way of it. Enable your teams, be smart. Really truly enable them though. Too often, and we've had our own struggles with that too, you know, we give them the tools, we send out an email, you expect them to just dig in. But one, they're not going to dig in in the right way. They're not going to use it in the way you want them to. So you have to be very, very specific and you have to hold hands a little bit. You have to say this is how we can help you be more effective. Case in point: video editing today is, I mean, game changing what you can do with AI. Our VP of communications, who is not a deep video editor, if you're wondering, has been enabled with tools and skills to where he can edit video now like that, like that, and like very professional looking stuff that years ago, you would have been like, that would have taken how many hours or how many days, that you can pop out now in a very quick amount of time simply because of the tools and the skills that are available. But make sure that you are teaching your people how they should use it. Don't just give them the tool and say, okay, go try and figure it out. They won't. And they'll waste a whole bunch of time in the meantime. But if you can make sure they understand, okay, my email marketers, hey, my web team, hey, my event team, hey, my PR team, hey, my content team, how can we make you the human more impactful? That is the power of AI: making humans all the more better and not being scared or resistant to, well, AI could probably do that better than I could. Great! Do it! Move on! Go to the next thing! Stop it! Stop being so worried about, if I do that, what if AI... knock it off! Let AI be good at what AI is good at and then let it help you amplify what it is that you do as a human. Like, that's the power.
Benjamin Ard04:11 — I love that. I love it. No, and I agree with the sentiment here. Like there are a lot of people, especially in marketing, that are very timid to kind of jump in with both feet and ultimately just kind of expose themselves. And really if AI does something better than them, great, own that, let AI do it better than you and be the person that figured it out and move on to the next thing.
Mark Boothe04:11 — Well, in passion point number one, check mark.
Benjamin Ard04:35 — So when it comes to your team, obviously you've got individuals that you've brought on. I love that you've hired and enabled those individuals. They're all completely focused on AI besides that hire. How have you held people's hands to ultimately get them into the systems, get them into AI and think about it in an entirely new way? How are you actually making them better? Two, three, four, five X. How are you improving them? Like what does the hand holding process look like?
Mark Boothe05:03 — Yeah, I mean, we've definitely talked about it, I don't know how many times now, in monthly all hands or whatnot. But that individual that I told you about, let me tell you a little bit of a story about him. His name is Jake. It's not Jake from State Farm. It's a different Jake. I can't say his name because I don't want other people trying to steal him because he's just amazing. Sad story, bad job, Mark: he sent me a note quite a long time ago on LinkedIn wanting to connect, and I admittedly get a fair amount of outreach on LinkedIn and I am not always as good at responding as I should be. I didn't respond to him. This was quite a while ago. Well, then a good friend sent me this Jake's profile, was like, you should take a look at this person. I'm like, huh. And it was after, later, that I realized, shoot, he did reach out. I never responded. Well, this guy's resume was literally, it was a custom GPT that he had built to answer any question. And I mean, like deep, deep, deep, deep stuff about him. And I'm playing around with this asking questions. And I'm like, holy cow. This is incredible. And so very, very quickly, I offered him a job and got him over here. And his job is to help people get up and running. And you know, we brought on Gemini Enterprise, that's something that we're using over here, big Google fans, and, you know, we're big Claude Code users. But again, the key is make sure that you help them see how it is relevant to them. Not just, the easiest thing to do is, okay, you've got the tools, now go play around. You will fail. Maybe one in 10 people will be the Jake-like people who are like, I'm just going to figure this out and I'm going to go move mountains with it. And the others will be like, well, one, they may not ever use it. Two, they'll get stuck doing stuff that really is not valuable at all to you. It's like, well, you gave me the tool. I was like, I might as well use the tool. Yeah, I want you to use the tool to make yourself more effective doing the job that you were supposed to be doing. And so just be so, so specific. If you are an email marketer, these are the skills and tools and things you should be using to help you do X, Y, Z. If you manage a website, here is the package, the tools, the skills, whatever else that you should use to do X, Y, Z. Let me make sure it's on your computer, on your machine, that you know exactly what to do with it. And then let me help you along the way if you need the help. But the power, what my VP of comms is doing right now, Ben, with video creation is ludicrous. It's crazy. And you know what it was? It was Jake, not from State Farm, the other Jake, who sat down and enabled them and gave him, you know, essentially a zip file of all these tools and skills and whatever else, and taught him. And then it's like, whoa, like I can do what? Like he's not a video editor. And all of a sudden he is popping stuff out that is crazy. And you think of how you can scale that now across every single portion of the business. Think of an account development manager whose entire job is, I am going to find creative and productive ways to get someone to respond to me. That might be LinkedIn, that might be phone, that might be email, that might be snail mail. I don't really care, as long as the end goal is we get you to respond. You can do research with AI in ways now that would have taken you mountains of hours. But don't be lazy. Like that is the big, I mean, you look at all the stuff, so much of the stuff, Ben, that we see online today and it's just, it's AI slop. It's terrible. It drives me bananas. I get outreach all the time, all the time. And the vast majority, if you look at my LinkedIn, you'll see a whole lot of posts about, there's another screen of a whole bunch of numbers that I don't know that are dialing me. Or, you know, there's outreach all the time that so much of it is terrible. We do not live in an era in a time where outreach should be terrible because AI makes it possible to know about anything and everything you want to know about Mark Boothe. You could see what I've posted. You could see what I care about. You could see everything. So if it comes up, I had somebody just, I don't remember if I saw it today, who essentially came and pitched me on what Domo is. And I'm like, like that is literally what we do. Why would you waste your time? Now, maybe it's a game. Maybe it's like, I want to go pitch the CMO and see if I can get them to buy, but no, I'm not going to go buy your solution that competes with what we're doing. Like, don't be dumb. Take the opportunity to use AI to be smarter and better than you've ever been. And those are just a couple of examples. And you could take that across the entire marketing journey. Don't go and create just AI slop for content. Yeah, you could produce hundreds, thousands, millions of pieces of content every day if you want to. That's not the point. Make yourself smarter, make yourself faster, make yourself better, but make sure that you're still trying to get whatever that end goal is for your business or your organization. If it's just put out massive amounts of content, great. I don't think it will do anything for you, but great. Yes, AI could help you with that all day long. But be very judicious about how you use it, where you use it, and make sure that the human in you still shines.
Benjamin Ard10:07 — I love that. So I want to dive into the human part that you just talked about, but just to double clip on a couple of things. What I love that you're talking about, and a lot of teams get frustrated because the mandate to use AI is purely an efficiency play. And I love that you've called out, yes, you should be that much more efficient at what you do. And like, even with this own podcast, when we first started it, we could publish one episode a week. And now we publish four. And AI is the difference. It takes out the busy work that took forever. Now, the other cool part that what you're talking about though is quality. And I think this is underutilized with AI, that we often just say, great, I'm gonna do the same level of work, but I'm gonna do two to three X what it was. And I love the call out to say, no, let's increase the quality. Let's do an amazing outreach. Like AI, I mean, I'm gonna give tips away right here that I think would be important. If someone was trying to get ahold of you and their AI was connected to like a sending tool, it would be really easy to figure out you're a big BYU fan. And if they sent you a signed BYU football that happened to show up on your desk, that might work better than a cold call or something like that. You know, the quality can increase. So how are you measuring quality with your team as well? How are you looking at it and really holding them to a higher standard and a more efficient standard? I feel like people struggle and they either push for one or the other and measure those, especially with your background with data. How have you kind of implemented mechanisms to say, hey, let's look at the quality and continue to get better and better with our quality as well with AI?
Mark Boothe11:45 — Yeah, I mean you have to still be, again, so easy to just say content at scale, I can do that all day long. You could take what used to be one a week and create four now. That's amazing. Well, guess what, you got to be really careful. Google still, as much as people might want to fight, you still reign supreme. They do. Yes, AEO, GEO is more important than it has ever been. But you know what, a whole ton of money and eyeballs are still going to Google. And AEO and GEO obviously have a ton to do with Google specifically. But you start just putting out a whole bunch of slop and you're going to get dinged. Like you really don't think that the smartest search company in the world doesn't know when all you're doing is using AI to create some crap on a website. Like, come on. So all about scale, all about efficiency, but without question. So there's another Jake, Jacob actually, who runs our web, who's amazing. We were together at Instructure. He's just absolutely incredible. And he is, he's very good at using AI, but he's also very good at realizing that we've still got to have the human touch. We've put some really cool things in place to help us to scale and to move quickly. But I don't want junk because what that's going to do is just smash your AEO score. It's not gonna help you from a long-term perspective. So there has to be a heavy balance of yes, let's scale and let's scale quickly, but don't lose the most important part, which is you, the human. When we had our big event, we call it Domopalooza, up at the Grand America just back in March, it's always, the person who runs our events, corporate events like that, is just brilliant. She is so, so, so good. And she puts all of these special cool human touches, like we had a 17 piece orchestra that started out the show. There's a Kabuki curtain that drops and all of a sudden people are seeing this just massive orchestra, and partway through a DJ, you know, kind of turns things on and a drummer in the other corner. And there's this big video, just incredible video that was heavily, heavily AI infused as you can imagine, that talks all about this idea. The key part was that the most important part in all of this, it's not the technology, it's you. And it was, you know, if I had that video playing on here, you'd be like, wow, because it was pretty impactful. And once we call out the fact that the real difference maker, the big change engine, the most important part is you, everything in the video changed and enhanced. And it was magical and beautiful. And that's the key. The key is not, wow, you can use Claude to be 20X more efficient. Yes, you can. You can use Gemini to do this, that, and the other. Fantastic. But more importantly, don't let it shut down who you are. Let it help you be more magical. Let it help you be more empowered. Let it help you be more effective in your job. But don't lose the magic that is you, because that's where the magic actually comes from. It's not from I can create 100 new case studies now. That's silly.
Benjamin Ard14:48 — I love that. Well, Mark, I was going to ask a follow up question, but honestly, I think that's a beautiful ending to this episode. We've run out of time anyways. Be you. Let AI enhance who you are and really don't let that go away with AI. I think that's an awesome message. I think that's wonderful for the audience. Mark, for anyone listening who wants to reach out and continue the conversation online, how and where can they find you?
Mark Boothe15:11 — Yeah, best place without question, I am a big fan and advocate of LinkedIn. I am on there on a daily basis without question. And I am very human on that platform, you will see it. And so engage with me there. I'd love to connect. So follow me, connect with me. And I'd love to meet up some point here locally in Utah or wherever I am in the states or in the world.
Benjamin Ard15:32 — Love it. For anyone listening, regardless of what platform you're on, scroll down to the show notes. You will see a link directly to Mark's LinkedIn profile. Go ahead and click on it. Connect. Say you came from the podcast, all that fun stuff. Mark, again, thank you so much for the time and insights today. Really do appreciate it.
Mark Boothe15:48 — Thanks, Ben.
