Jason Mlicki (00:00.92)
You know, Jeff, before we hit record, I forgot to mention the to our guest, Casey Slaughter Stanton, that this is two fifty. This is our two hundred and fiftieth anniversary episode. So you’re like a you’re like a big deal, man. Like you’re like our, you know, our our our number our number one guest, number two fifty.

Jeff McKay (00:14.031)
Well.

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (00:19.351)
I love it. maybe you guys could like commemorate it with a park bench.

Jeff McKay (00:24.024)
Yeah.

Jason Mlicki (00:27.118)
We’ll put it right in front of Jeff’s Alice.

Jeff McKay (00:31.343)
That works for me.

Jason Mlicki (00:32.718)
Well, all right. Well, Casey, thank you for joining us. just maybe maybe just tell us about you, tell us about CMOX, the the founder of CMOX, tell us about that, and we’re gonna jump in to talk about the future of the marketing organization as it relates to AI and everything going on. So just just jump in.

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (00:51.75)
Yeah, great. So the basic story is I grew up in the Detroit area. My dad worked for IBM. I was one of the first kids in my neighborhood to get a computer. And I was, I think in a lot of ways, one of the first kind of digital natives. you know, we were on Prodigy way back when. And as time progressed, after college, I started working with a marketing agency. And I was lucky the marketing agency was doing a bunch of cool stuff.

We were doing things like we retooled Tony Robbins Salesforce org. We launched Jordan Belfort, The Wolf of Wall Street’s straight line persuasion system when the Scorsese film went live and he wanted to make a couple bucks in the back end. I worked in a bunch of businesses at an agency. And as anyone that works in an agency knows, it’s just like it’s everything all at once. And the the amount of experience that you get is like unrivaled in the same amount of time. So I really enjoyed myself at the agency.

And what I found was that I was often doing a lot of marketing strategy for folks. And the strategy was the fun stuff and the implementation was required. over time, I got a I grew like a little frustrated with the agency because I would go and I would go to an event and I would prospect and I would find a client to work as like a consulting client, and then I would bring them home and close them.

And service them. And I wasn’t making much money on it. I was making 40, 45% of the total top line. And that got a little frustrating for me. So I decided to just go off on my own. And I knew that if I was going to go off on my own, the things that I wanted to do were strategy and leadership, specifically marketing strategy, marketing leadership. And I didn’t want to do implementation. And I struggled with like what that role was called. I didn’t want to be a consultant because all my life, my dad was a consultant after he left IBM.

All these other consultants I saw, they would go in, they would do their thing, and then they would get their check and leave. And the checks were big. I mean, I remember my my dad after he retired, he was making 150% his effective hourly rate when he came back to consult, which was nice, but the projects would last for a month or two. They weren’t long term projects. So I wanted to last longer. I wanted to stick around for the long haul. And I realized the way to do that is to be the chief marketing officer.

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (03:13.734)
Like that’s the real role, be the CMO. but I didn’t want to be just that one company. I think partly because of the agency model, I liked jumping back and forth between different companies. And also part of me just didn’t trust that a company was going to be solvent for that long. You know, everything was changing. So I decided to be the CMO for multiple companies. And it turns out that that term is called the fractional CMO. So I picked up a few clients. It’s a fractional CMO. I left the agency and really have never looked back. Then the pandemic hit.

All the lockdowns in March of 2020. And all of my buddies in marketing, Jason, they all lost their jobs. they lost their clients. So friends that had SEO agencies, PPC agencies, their clients would call them and be like, hey man, I’m really sorry to do this, but we’re gonna have to pause our contract indefinitely. And it’s not like those agencies could go after those companies for money, you know. That was just like that was just the times. So these marketers lost everything. Because if you think about it, you don’t need someone to manage your ads.

Every single day of the week. You could take a month off of ad management and maybe results would go down, but like maybe not. It might be okay for a month. Same with SEO. People can glide on SEO for months at a time without necessarily a negative impact. So during all that time, I found that none of my fractional CMO engagements decreased or disappeared. if anything, I was needed more. And if you think about it, it’s because these companies already had the leader in the marketing department, the CMO. They’re not gonna like not have a CMO.

They’re gonna get rid of the SEO person. They still need messaging. They still need, I was working with a franchise at the time, and they definitely needed me to support the franchisees who were, you know, worried about having doors closed. I was with a fitness franchise and they had to shut their doors across almost every state. So it was a difficult time, but it proved that the fractional CMO role is the right role. And then I had a bunch of people ask me, Can I join your company? Will you hire me as a fractional CMO to work for you?

And what I realized is that they didn’t actually want me to work, they didn’t want to work for me, they wanted to work on their own, they wanted to be their own CEO, they wanted to own their own business. So I decided to take my experience. I was previously a professor, adjunct professor at Tulane. I love the teaching side. And I took the love for teaching, love for marketing, fractional CMO, and I put it together and built CMOX, where now we train the top fractional CMOs and help them win clients and serve their clients, get those long-term clients and build a fractional CMO practice.

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (05:38.245)
That reaches a half million dollars a year. And that’s where I spend my time now. plus I service a a couple clients too as a fractional CMS.

Jason Mlicki (05:47.471)
It’s great backstory. I I really appreciate you sharing kind of just how you found yourself where you are right now. Let’s talk about where the CMO role is going and where the marketing organization is going. Because I love that you looked backwards. I always talk about when you when you’re well, when you want to look ahead, you gotta kinda look back to where you’ve been and why. And I think it’s important to to understand that context. And now I wanna say I think we’re at we’re at we’re at a similar

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (05:57.626)
Mm.

Jason Mlicki (06:14.134)
See change. I mean, you described the pandemic and how it changed behavior a lot and how it changed the nature of of a lot of things. but we’re also going through something similar right now where AI is kind of resetting marketing in in a on a whole bunch of ways. And there’s a bunch of other stuff going on too. So talk to us about what where where where you see marketing headed, you know, you know, from a organizational perspective. Where where do you see as as a fractional CMO

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (06:35.333)
Mm.

Jason Mlicki (06:42.102)
Either you or or your fractional CMOs, when you talk to your teams, what what do you where do you see things going?

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (06:50.425)
Yeah, okay, so I don’t know if a lot of folks are really familiar with the term CMO. Like they’ve heard it, they know it, whatever, but like do they know where it came from? And it was like Coca-Cola brought it about in the 1990s. You know, like they named Sergio Simon, what? Yeah, they did, they did. In the nineties, like thirty-five years ago, this title came about.

Jason Mlicki (07:09.922)
They named the thing. They named the thing. Coca-Cola named

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (07:20.523)
And it’s because, you know, since the 1900s, there’s always been kind of marketing inside of advertising and sales, but like it it’s it’s kind of just been subordinate to sales. And now we’re seeing that it’s more important than ever before. So it’s a relatively nascent role. and I see it just like expanding because if you think about it, everyone wants the top. They want the thing. You know, everyone wants

The high-end thing that they can’t afford. And they’ll take the the discount version of it if it gets them close to it. So, you know, you could think of it like companies that can’t afford a full-time CMO. Maybe a full-time CMO costs them $250,000, $300,000 plus plus plus, plus bonuses, plus equity, plus RSUs, plus whatever. they can’t afford that person. Yet they want that person. They want the innovation for that person. I can think of one of our CMOs. She is super sharp.

Former CMO of Ancestry.com. I mean, you kind of can’t find a more relevant former CMO to work on a company that’s a direct-to-consumer, especially a direct-to-consumer family purchasing kind of thing. She’s so good. And the company, a company that hired her, couldn’t afford her at her full-time rate. I mean, her full-time in-office rate would be big. but they could have her for all of her best ideas applied to them.

For just a fraction of the time. And I think it’s an amazing opportunity for everybody. It gives the CMO the freedom and flexibility and the impact that she wants. But on the other side, it gives the business the insights that they need from someone who’s been there, done that. So I think that we’re going to see an adoption of CMOs for that reason. Same reason that everyone here wants a CFO. We all want a CFO. Like, I don’t want a bookkeeper to tell me what my books look like. You know, I want someone to like,

Think strategically about cash flow and taxes and all that stuff. I want a CFO, but I don’t need a 40 hour week CMO or a 50, 60 hour week CMO. I need a CMO that pops in, I don’t know, four hours a week, 10 hours a week at most. So we we are gonna want more of these the of this level of expertise. And then on the other side, I think we can talk about the general kind of dynamic of AI and labor and happy to dive more into this too, but

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (09:41.626)
If we think about what happened during the pandemic, I think that there was the leave the office kind of initiative. Everyone left their office and they worked from home. When you work from home, we saw the rise of the adoption of asynchronous communication and video calls. Companies that never would have work from home folks started having work from home folks. Well, that makes sense. You saw the rise of Slack and Google Meet and Teams and all that stuff.

Jason Mlicki (10:07.606)
Yeah.

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (10:09.571)
Zoom. Zoom had their massive valuations during that time.

then what happened is I think business owners started noticing, like, I don’t know, Jeff at home or someone in the Philippines. Who cares? Like, who cares if it’s Jeff at home or someone in the Philippines at home? Like, as long as the work gets done, they’re satisfied. They don’t need the person that they saw in the office to be the worker anymore. It’s just a name on Slack. It’s just a voice in a chat. It’s not like

The person face to face with them. So I think folks started hiring overseas. I think Upwork and other sites like that got to be really big. you know, Philippines was a big hiring center, but also like Latin America, the big Latin American hiring boom. I think that Africa is massive right now. We’re talking about like a billion people in Africa coming online for the first time, and they have access to cell phones.

And you can do a lot with a cell phone if you’re you know, committed enough. And those people have a very low cost of living. So you see this cost parity of being able to hire folks overseas. And I think that’s really changing the way people see things. And then you’re in your third wave, you know, like kind of the resulting wave of all this stuff is you know, th it was first like tenured people in office, then it was those tenured people at home and kind of the mix of overseas people. And now it’s agentic AI.

I think it’s a weird term to say agentic AI. I don’t know if a lot of people get the whole agent thing. But the thing, Jason and Jeff, that I’m most interested in right now, that I think is the most fundamentally shifting for me is computer use. That is an AI moving the mouse and keyboard and doing things for me. And we’re at a level where it’s good. Like it is completely acceptable. It’s slow.

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (12:08.443)
But it’s no slower than me saying, hey Jeff, can you work on this a little later today? And you’re like, sure, I’ve got some stuff working on I’m working on today. I’ll get to it later. It’s like, if that’s the case, it might take you four, five, six hours before it’s done. Maybe it only took you an hour to do it, but it took you maybe six hours from the time of asking. I can ask computer use, and computer use can maybe take a full day. But I don’t care. Like the there’s no difference then if it can do it exceedingly well for me. So I think we’re getting to a place where talent.

Is going overseas and becoming agentic. And I think we’re seeing companies lean towards that. And at the same time, there needs to be someone who’s responsible for it all. I think of that quote from IBM where they said something like, we can’t sorry, a robot can never be a manager, a computer can never be a manager because a computer cannot be held accountable. So the department will need someone to be held accountable. Who will that person be?

That person will be the CMO. So I think the two pressures of business owners want a CMO because why wouldn’t you want the person who’s been there done that? Kind of leading the way. And the business owners need a CMO to be responsible for the outcome of the marketing department so they can tell their shareholders or their board or their customers or their spouses that things broke because Jason broke it, not because I prompted something wrong as the CEO.

So I think we’re gonna see a rise in the demand for the CMO. but there’s a bunch of kind of knock on effects, which is the CMO is gonna have to get more done with less humans. And that’s gonna be a whole thing that we can talk about. So that’s my initial kind of thesis of this is that the role of the CMO is gonna be more important than ever. And the marketing department is shrinking from the bottom up. We don’t need the content writers we used to have. We don’t need the copywriters. We don’t need the bottom forty percentile of copywriters. We don’t need the bottom forty percentile of any role.

right now. You know, they’re all kind of being liquidated and stolen by these AI tools.

Jeff McKay (14:13.978)
So Casey, I think that’s an incredible perspective. if you were and you are building a marketing organization from scratch today, what I hear you saying is the fulcrum is a CMO and potentially a fractional CMO, depending on the size of the organization.

What would you build differently?

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (14:47.087)
Yeah. great question. I mean I think it’s kind of dependent. Could you could you add to that prompt maybe an industry that we’re building for?

Jeff McKay (14:57.518)
But professional services that are listeners.

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (15:01.605)
So in professional services, like an example would be what? Like bookkeeping, tax strategy, HVAC.

Jeff McKay (15:07.568)
Accounting, IT consulting.

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (15:10.543)
Yeah, great. Cool. at the end of the day, it’s a leads issue. Right? So for so many businesses, it’s a leads issue. They’re not getting enough leads. And maybe they’re not getting enough leads because of different differentiation. the marketing department that I would build would be first to go after, like to have a clear marketing strategy of where you would get your customers from. So, Jeff, if you just chose one of those, like IT services, let’s say, where are they getting their customers from by?

Jeff McKay (15:38.488)
personal relationships from consultants doing business development, maybe some stuff online.

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (15:46.627)
And then who are the customers? Are they companies in their local area that they can drive to?

Jeff McKay (15:54.127)
not necessarily. I think given your description post COVID, they’re being served virtually by most of these organizations now.

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (16:05.945)
Got it. Okay. So, I mean, one of the cool things that we can do now is we can find a total addressable audience. So I like the tool Apollo.io. That’s a great tool to go in and just find companies like a company. So we could go into Apollo and we’d search for a company name, and then we would look at Apollo’s classification of that company. So it would have an industry or a series of industries and then keywords associated with it, and then employee size and revenue and

location and things like that. So the first thing I would do is I would look up the name of a company that I would love to work with or a current customer that I’d love to replicate, figure out their industry and their keywords. So their industry would likely be professional services and then their keywords would be IT, computers, consulting, something like that. And if you do kind of a reverse search against that DNA, you’re going to find all of the companies that are like that in the United States or Canada or wherever you want.

And then you want to add a filter. I think the common filter people want to add is revenue. I think data’s hard on revenue right now, and we don’t have good data on revenue. So most companies don’t have accurate revenue reported, but they tend to have accurate employee counts. And the reason is because an employee eagerly updates their LinkedIn to state that they work for the company. So anyone that’s scraping that data could count the number of employees and kind of surmise the size of the company. So I would do employee count.

And then I would choose a geography. And it doesn’t matter the geography, but you gotta start somewhere. I like to start in my backyard. I live in Philly, so I would do the Philly and then like maybe the New York Philly DC or up to Boston. Try to like grab just part of the country to work it instead of the whole thing, because the whole thing just feels kind of impossible to work. And then I would lay out marketing campaigns to go after those folks. And those campaigns could be direct mail, those campaigns could be PPC.

It could be dominating the like SEO or AIO to resolve in Chat GPT’s responses or Claude’s. Actually, I was so excited on Friday. a lead came in. someone wanted to hire one of our CMOs, and he said, I just looked at Claude and asked them, and you were the number one response. Like to me, that’s that’s a big deal. Like today, intelligent.

Jeff McKay (18:32.049)
huh.

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (18:34.373)
Well researched buyers are going on the AI platforms to do search to figure out where the person is, like who the person is. So I think having marketing campaigns around all of those things is important. monitoring staff changes, funding, announcements, website changes for all of these top dream companies is the goal that I would have. And I would monitor those.

So then the CMO’s role would be to take these initial campaigns, lay them out, and then choose how they’re going to attack each of those things. Are they going to send direct mail? If so, what’s the piece and how often and who’s the mailing house that’s going to do it? If we’re going to do AIO, so that’s AI optimization to be number one on the response for ChatGPT or Gemini or Copilot or whatever, how are you going to build content around that? What’s the thesis? Are you doing it in-house? Are you hiring an agency to support you? If you’re doing PPC to go after them,

Setting up a piece PPC campaign has never been easier. But also the creative that you have to have because of creative fatigue has never been harder. Like you’re forced to put in really smart, creative, and rotate it all the time. So the team that I would build would be specific to the things that I would want them to do. And a a title that I came up with years ago that I still think is really relevant today is that of the marketing technician. I don’t want to hire.

A content writer and a copywriter and a web developer and a analytics person and data scientists. And I don’t want to hire those titles because I don’t want those, I don’t want those titles. I want the work done, but I don’t want the titles. So my hack around that is to find smart, hardworking, self-starting people where I give them an outcome and I say, Hey, we gotta build this ad campaign. And if I can give them a little bit of space to build it and kind of coach them and they have access to

The latest clawed models or chat GPT models, they’re gonna build an awesome campaign and then they’re gonna be managing it. So I see that being the thing. A marketing technician that comes in and does the thing. They run the ads and they run the ads for like a month or two, and they say, Great, now we’re gonna add this other thing. We’re gonna do direct mail. Then they’re gonna run that for a month or two concurrently. They’re gonna do both things. I’m gonna add a third thing to their plate. And the workload that they have expands over time, but it becomes routine.

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (20:55.641)
And because it becomes routine, it takes less work for them to actually do it. So that’s the team that I would build. And the CMO should have the taste and discernment and experience to know if what get what is getting built is right, if it’s like done right. It’s like a chef. A chef can just like walk in and taste as the sous chef’s kind of cooking stuff up. They can just taste it and be like a little bit more salt. that’s not right. I need more garlic in that. That’s what a CMO needs to do. They need to come in.

taste the marketing and make sure that things taste right and guide the team to do the things that are right. But the CMO also doesn’t have to be the one peeling the garlic. They don’t have to be the one writing the copy. Other people can do that or AI tools can do that. They certainly can get started. So I’m happy to dive into any of those specifics. Yeah.

Jeff McKay (21:40.056)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Mlicki (21:42.211)
Well, I want to summarize what I think I heard you say. Because I think what I heard you say is that you would have no specialist roles really. You would have a senior strategic CMO leader, someone who’s guiding the direction of the marketing effort to meet the needs of the business, and then a set of generalist technicians who would rely on specialist skills mainly through AI.

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (21:52.431)
I wouldn’t.

Jason Mlicki (22:09.71)
possibly still through people. I mean I that that that that re remains up up in the air based on what I heard, but that’s not what I heard.

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (22:13.893)
Yeah, I’m happy to have people. I th I think I think one of the problems is like if it’s too much AI, you really need a lot of oversight. So Jason, the the idea of the slop loop, which is the generation of slop that looks good and gets posted that generates maybe a response that isn’t necessarily the response that you want, but it looks good, just precipitates an ongoing cycle of just generating garbage. And it takes a CMO to know that. But yes, yes to everything you said.

Jason Mlicki (22:25.485)
Yeah.

Jason Mlicki (22:42.392)
Yeah, it’s funny because Jeff and I in the the in the last episode where so this is sort of a a research initiative is the way we’re discussed just framing this where we’re kind of we’re having conversations with people like you to kind of form a hypothesis about what where where marketing is headed as a result of of AI and other other trends. and we sort of had this this argument about productivity last time or a couple of times ago. And

And one of my hypotheses was that you yi is AI slop is g is going to just continue to get out of control, which means then then that outcomes are going to decline. and then people are going to be stuck back in the loop trying to solve for that again. anyway, that was that was way off.

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (23:22.511)
Yeah, no, and I and I think I think that one of the problems is that business owners lack taste in marketing. Right? Because they’re like, ever everyone comes g my belief is that like CEOs start with a pedigree. I worked for a guy when I was doing a it’s kind of a franchise, but we bought dental practices during the height of the pandemic. We just like reached out to people, Hey Dr. Jason, can we buy your practice and let you retire? You know, we’ll hire you as an employee for twelve months and then you’ll be out. And I worked with this guy.

Jason Mlicki (23:29.398)
Ha ha ha.

Jason Mlicki (23:42.115)
Yeah.

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (23:52.166)
He was formerly on Wall Street. He’s just a Wall Street guy. He was a numbers guy. Super smart. But like was a numbers guy. He just was like a freak in the sheets, you know, in the spreadsheets. And I also worked with other guys, not long after, who were like.

Like just sales guys. Any problem that they had, they just picked up the phone and solved it. They were just sales guys. They’d fly around and go do big deals. They have different approaches to things. Neither of those guys had taste for marketing. And they were very different CEOs. Both have been incredibly successful. because the CEO lacks oftentimes the taste for marketing, they might spin something up on Chat GPT or Claude.

Or copilot or whatever, and say, This is it, guys. I found it. This is the thing that we’ve been missing. And it takes a lot. It takes leadership to push back and be like, Jeff, that’s garbage, dude. Like what you just generated is actually bad. And I can tell you why. But I think of Brandolini’s law. Have you guys heard of Brandolini’s law? It states that the amount of effort required to like kind of refute bullshit.

Is an order of magnitude larger than the energy used to create it. So the client

Jason Mlicki (25:11.0)
You know, Casey, you just described my my two hundred and fifty episodes with Jeff, how much effort I have to generate to shut down his BS. I it it’s exhausting. It’s wearing me down. It’s wearing me out. I thank you. Thank you for for labeling it.

Jeff McKay (25:16.08)
Ha.

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (25:16.303)
Ha ha ha.

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (25:22.287)
Yeah. Yeah, totally. Yeah. But I I think of I think of Brandolini’s Law because some, you know, a CEO would be like, I’m so stuck on this. They had a glass of wine, they asked Chat GPT late at night, they felt like it was the right answer, because it looked like the right answer, but it’s not. I mean and and it’s just like it’s so frustrating for us marketers who have to go back and dismantle this whole

you know, kind of false narrative around like what needs to be fixed and why. And, you know, the moment that we go in there and we prompt the AI correctly, the AI is like, you’re right. I totally forgot that. That’s my bad. And no one’s to blame for the waste of hours and energy and frustration. I was helping a client with a project of doing some emails. I still like doing a little bit of copywriting. So this is emails for a short term nurture sequence and it’s just the first couple emails. And then the client threw them through AI and spat back out a reply.

And said like all the things that I did wrong. And I called them right away and I said, Hey guys, don’t ever do it again. Like I can’t have you do this. Like I can spend time telling you why the AI is wrong, or you can just like blindly trust me because you pay me enough to be the person that you blindly trust. What would you rather do? And they’re like, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you. It’s like, it just wastes my time. You know? I studied copywriting. I know cop like when I think of my pedigree, it’s copywriting.

Jason Mlicki (26:28.099)
Yeah.

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (26:49.731)
If it was technology and like the development of code and someone came and questioned me, fine, I’ll listen. But like not when it’s in my sweet spot. And these business owners just don’t know the difference. They feel incredibly powerful, but it’s like the Dunning Kruger effect. You know, they’re at that initial peak of enlightenment. what is it called? where they fall down. Dunning Kruger effect. They fall down the

yeah, yeah. Peak of Mount Stupid. That’s where a lot of people are. They’re at the peak of Mount Stupid and they fall down the valley of despair and then they climb the slope of enlightenment. And it’s not that business owners can’t be intelligent with marketing. Given time, most business owners can be great at marketing, but oftentimes they’re just YOLOing answers about marketing and stating how things are without fully understanding things. And that just wastes everyone’s time. And again, the CMO just like pops in and it’s like, nope, nope.

Like that saves so much time instead of you know, the CMO having to like be there forty hours a week and kind of disarm these objections.

Jeff McKay (28:05.7)
So is is that the skill of the future CMO being able to call bullshit? Or or what what do you think as as as as AI evolves, how does the role of the CMO evolve in your model?

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (28:14.672)
It’s a good question, is it? I think it’s

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (28:27.332)
So I think of I think of Jeff Bezos’ one-way door and two-way door analogy, where he states that some decisions are one-way doors, which is you can go through it, but you can’t reverse it. And others are two-way doors where you can reverse it. And I think when businesses when when marketing go to market, product launches, improvements, communication, whatever, when it’s a series of two-way doors, there’s less need for the CMO and it can be kind of ragtag. But when you gotta get it right.

When you have to get it right, you need that like that one-way door and you can’t be wrong. You need someone that can be, first of all, accountable to the outcome. Like it it is it is it matters for a company to fire someone. Like when a football team does poorly, who do they fire? The quarterback? No, they fire the coach. Like they need someone to blame. Everyone’s like, that was a bad era. That’s when Coach McKay was there. You know, like that, they need to feel that. So

Jason Mlicki (29:24.097)
Yeah.

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (29:26.798)
I think that the CMO is going to be required in the role for the ownership of it.

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (29:34.414)
but then yes, I think that the leadership is an incredibly important component and the speed at which things get built is gonna be important. I think a a mental model, one that I hold often is this idea of the one P1B. That’s a one-person, one billion dollar a year company.

That’s like the asymptote. Like that’s where that’s where we kind of want to head towards. I think profitability-wise. You see these companies now that are doing record profit per employee. You know, in sales, they say you need to bring in at least two or three X your comp in total, you know, profit to the business. Well, now we’re seeing people bring being able to bring in 10 or 15 or 20 times their value, even more. So I think that that’s really interesting.

I think over time we’re going to see more of this agentic stuff. But the other pressure that’s happening at the exact same time is like this return to like real connection and community. I’ve gotten more focused on LinkedIn as of late. And what I find is LinkedIn is a cesspool of AI posts with AI comments, and then the poster replying to the AI comment with AI comments. It’s awful.

I mean, it is like the proliferation of the dead internet theory, which is like more than fifty percent of internet posts and people and content are robots, which is totally true. Like more than fifty percent. So we’re finding this fracturing of communities. I mean, are you guys in any communities? Text groups with your neighbors, Slack communities, WhatsApp groups, anything like that? Do you have any kind of yeah?

Jeff McKay (31:22.373)
Yes.

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (31:23.908)
Like what cycling communities, religious communities, that kind of thing, right? Like we find these fractured places. I mean, I’m on Discord, I’m on Slack, I’m on Reddit, I have WhatsApp groups, I have signal groups. I had a muted signal group this morning because it woke me up. So I have all of these like different groups, and the reason that we have those different groups is because they’re real people, and that’s important. And it’s not like just going on the internet and talking to somebody.

Jeff McKay (31:25.924)
Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (31:53.507)
Or hearing from somebody or whatever. It’s like knowing the person, maybe meeting up with them, having a real relationship, that kind of thing. We have a local group and we get together on Zoom calls like once a quarter. This is like a family group. we all kind of have some stuff in common. And we just get online and chat. And sometimes we get together with each other, but like we still chat on Zoom. That that kind of diaspora, those kind of affinity groups that exist all over the internet, I think is like the antithesis of AI content.

Like it would be unacceptable in those groups to do AI stuff. So you’re you’re having like these two kind of competing modalities, which is like local, community, real people, knowing each other, ensuring that they’re not robots, and then also kind of like mass market, can you do it in a way that’s effective, that generates a result? And I think that’s kind of competing against each other in some ways. but I think it’s a natural kind of competition as it’s like two sides of the same.

Jason Mlicki (32:53.91)
It doesn’t feel like an unusual tension though to me. Like it what came to mind as you’re talking about it, oddly enough, was restaurants. Yeah. In that you have hyperscale mega brands that are global in footprint and the process is down to the T. And in theory, it’s the same everywhere you go. and you’ve got boutique local hole in the walls, or or fine dining establishments, whatever they are, where

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (33:00.846)
Restaurants?

Jason Mlicki (33:22.87)
small little communities form. It it’s it feels like the same tension, a totally different dynamic totally different thing, but the same type of tension where on the one hand you have this thing that’s kind of scaled beyond anybody’s imagination and now is a kind of a

Jason Mlicki (33:41.95)
A band of mediocrit den of media mediocrity. Yes. Yes.

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (33:44.997)
Yeah. Yeah, the vanillification of kind of experience. Absolutely. And then Jason, I think if you layer onto that, how many of those restaurants, large and small, get their food from Cisco? So it’s the exact same potatoes and you know, it’s and it’s just baked a little different, or one puts garlic salt and the other one puts just garlic in it. yeah, it’s it’s it’s it’s definitely a different time. And I think that I mean we’re

As we record this, we’re just coming off the heels of Burning Man. Are you familiar with that festival of Burning Man? Yeah. So I went to the burn in 2010 and 2011. And it was just a different time then. There was no internet. You know, and people now are out there with their laptops working. It’s just it’s different. It’s like there’s like a blending of work and life in a way that never has happened before. And I don’t think it’s good and healthy and sustainable, but also it is the acceleration of business.

We’re seeing rapid acceleration, people able to come up with an idea and go from idea to production, you know, really quickly.

Jason Mlicki (34:47.682)
Yeah. I mean, there’s a couple of things I’m there’s a number of things I’m taking away from this conversation as it relates to the future of the marketing organization. I mean, I think one is lighter. You described it as shrinking from the bottom up. two is more strategic. So the recognition that it is feasible for sort of a business of almost any size to have a strategic fractional CMO at the helm, so strategic marketing leader at the helm.

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (34:57.424)
Mm-hmm.

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (35:13.338)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Mlicki (35:15.87)
Of a collection of possibly generalists supported by a army of specialists that can come from anywhere and can be people or can be silicon. I’m hearing also like sort of specialist roles, I think are are

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (35:27.397)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Mlicki (35:37.368)
I think it’d be interesting to hear your take on what s what s specialist roles you think are going to retain with people and which ones are going to be pure AI. Do you have a take on

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (35:47.633)
Sure. I mean, I think taste again is so important. what I’ve been able to do with chat GPT, you know, I’m a Claude guy. I’ve been using Claude since February fifth. I did about where I spent, you know, two hours a day minimum, seven days a week for like five months straight building and like learning how to use the AI. and I can build a lot of cool stuff, but there’s still like a final approval layer on everything.

Jason Mlicki (36:08.259)
Yeah.

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (36:17.87)
Like all the code should probably be reviewed by someone if there’s any potential room for someone to hack it. all design should be reviewed by someone who has a real sense of design. All copy should be reviewed by a copywriter. you know, like it’s important that these things get a final review to ensure congruence with the brand and that they’re right. So I think all roles are still relevant, but only at the top.

So that’s the big one. And then, second to that, I think human interfacing is really important. roles that communicate with people directly is going to be critically important to be human. I mean, I think it’s fine for like call centers. If some of the people listening to this ha wanna build a call center, you could do a call center that had AI answering, like those are pretty good today.

But like you also need to have humans behind it. Maybe you can capture fifty percent of the call volume with AI and then people are gonna get pissed off enough to demand, you know, live human, live human, live human, and finally get transferred to a human. So I think there’s gonna be a lot of that.

Jason Mlicki (37:25.484)
Yeah. I laugh, you know. Yeah. No, I I was just gonna say I laugh when you saying that only because I I wonder how much brand damage is being done by these firms as they’re rolling this out without knowing. And it comes back to your discernment thing, where it’s like they don’t even recognize that I’m so frustrated at the Hilton when I’m sitting in the hotel room trying to reach reach the front desk and they’ve stuck an AI in the loop and I can’t get to the front desk, but they’re damaging the brand.

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (37:37.517)
Immeasurable.

Mm-hmm.

Jason Mlicki (37:55.055)
They don’t even know it. And that comes back to your discernment comment. I think it’s really interesting.

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (37:56.985)
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that the top roles are always going to be there. I think that there’s going to be new roles, which is going to be kind of like a blending of departments. I mean, what’s the difference between marketing and customer service in your in your idea? Like, you know, like they’re kind of blended more than ever before. I worked at a company. I was like there they were an agency client of ours years ago and I just remember that.

Jason Mlicki (38:14.082)
Yeah. Yeah.

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (38:25.86)
They did like tax help. So people who had back taxes. so they had a call center and then they had customer service. And it was totally sexist. On one side was the call center, and they were all guys, and it smelled like Red Bull Mountain Dew. You know, it was just like aggressive dudes. They literally had a door that had padlocks on both sides. The other side was customer service. And it was light and it was pink and it was all women.

And they would never open the door between the two of them because it would have been like madness. I think that that kind of physical structure doesn’t exist, but I even think of it like a metaphor. I don’t think it exists anymore today. I think sales and customer service are blended. So we need to find someone who can straddle that. One of the things that I’ve done as a CMO is I’ve sat in sales meetings with the sales team because the sales team, Jason, they just want to complain about lead quality.

Like, so then what? I’m gonna go hear that my lead quality sucks. It’s like, no, guys. The report shows that it took you 12 to 24 hours to call the leads back. They’re decaying. Call them faster. Like, that’s gonna solve the lead quality issue more than us writing better copy. So the CMO is straddling more. I think everyone’s doing more. They’re more multidisciplinary than ever before. Where I see roles stay the same.

I think tech is very important to have someone inside that is very protective. You know, I think there needs to be someone, hopefully, if the business is large enough to be protective of brand, like they’re not gonna take a lot of chances. You want some people there that are like kind of angry that you’re trying to change things because they wanna keep a sense of consistency. Cause today I can vibe code a new page and launch it on a website faster than I could build it with the WordPress page builder.

And like while I can get it done faster and get more done today, I kind of fall from grace. My brand starts to get fractured. I start to lose that edge. I start to lose that consistency and and and and I think that people start losing trust in things. So I think that maintainers are going to be required. I mean, and there’s a whole other thing, Jason, around this, which is we could all vibe code something, but can we maintain it? We can build it, but like, do you really want to be the guy that gets called when it breaks or when

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (40:48.1)
Facebook makes an update and now it doesn’t work anymore? Probably not. So I think those roles are going to be required.

Jason Mlicki (40:56.834)
I think it’s interesting too. I don’t I don’t remember where the research was. So I’m not gonna name it because I don’t even remember if it’s public. It might be private research I was looking at on behalf of a client. But they’re all the budget that’s being used to do all the AI work inside of corporations, you know the number one source of budget for that, where they’re taking the budget from cybersecurity. So yeah.

Jeff McKay (40:57.124)
So we’re

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (41:17.808)
Where is it?

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (41:21.776)
No, no, no, no, no. Say this and so.

Jason Mlicki (41:25.1)
So s to your point, you we’re gonna roll all this stuff up, it’s all innovative, it’s all cool, and then it’s gonna get hacked because we actually slice the budget that’s there to protect us from, you know. So

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (41:35.374)
Okay, but Jason, who who is who who gets the phone call when that happens? The CMO.

Jason Mlicki (41:40.93)
Well, the CEO gets the phone call on that one, right? Like, I mean that’s the ’cause they’re the one that has to face the music. But so you know. Yeah. Yeah.

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (41:46.403)
Yeah, but then who like writes all of the copy around it and defends the organization and writes the press releases and you know, like there’s the technological fix, which might just be adding a comma to some code somewhere. but then the fallout falls on the CMO’s shoulders. And like pulling in a CMO last minute. Who what was that? there’s the cold play video where the CEO and the woman were like

Jason Mlicki (42:16.014)
yeah, yeah, I was all over the internet forever. So annoying.

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (42:16.878)
You know what I’m talking about? Yeah.

Yeah, and then they had to hire

Gwyneth Paltro, kind of as like their PR oops, we made a mistake person. You know, like that is like she was the face of it afterwards. What an expensive solution for them. Terrible. so I I just I think that there’s a lot, a lot of risk around AI development. But then the question is like, can you move fast enough? Like you’re on fire and things are burning, but you’re moving so fast that you’re kind of extinguishing the flames.

Just through your own speed? I don’t know. I think time will tell with some of these companies. But I think we’re gonna see a lot of data breaches, a lot of hacks. it’s gonna be a tough time for a lot of businesses.

Jason Mlicki (43:07.02)
Yeah. When I was rapid firing, tried to summarize your your everything you’ve said, the two things I wanted to add that I missed was I think marketing organizations are going to be expected to go fast way faster based on what we heard and create way more value. The thing that jumped out to me as you were talking was, you know, this obsession with revenue per employee or profit per employee and getting to like, you know, one P one B, which I by the way, I think is ridiculous. But

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (43:18.584)
Way faster.

Jason Mlicki (43:36.193)
Not because it’s un undoable, because it’s a ridiculous idea. But doesn’t matter, that’s a different kind of topic. But but the but the but the thing about it is that the expectation you know, Jeff and I always talk about like what do you expect out of a consultant? If you paid a consultant a million dollars to come in and do whatever they’re gonna do, they better deliver at least 10x, 10, 20x, 50x. That relationship is going to get way bigger.

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (43:41.71)
I I’m with you on that though. Yeah.

Jason Mlicki (44:07.244)
Right? The expectation between what I’m getting from spending my million dollars with you is gonna be a lot more. And I’m gonna expect it a lot faster. And that’s kind of like trickling down to the marketing work. But okay, let’s let’s let’s wrap up here. I I I we could talk all day. what’s Jeff, what’s what’s the last thing we wanna ask Casey before we let him go?

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (44:13.679)
Mm-hmm.

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (44:18.768)
That’s right.

Jeff McKay (44:33.434)
Casey, what do you think marketers today are gonna look back in five years from now and say, We got that wrong?

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (44:48.877)
Mm.

I think of that quote from like kind of he said it multiple times, Richard Branson, you know, like what is the most important thing in the marketing department or whatever? You know, well if you had to redo it r you know, start from scratch, what would you do? And he’s like the brand, the brand, the brand. Like that’s the most important thing.

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (45:09.004)
And branding matters in a world of copycats. You know, at the end of the day, why do you want the thing? Like why why do women spend so much money on tights? You know, they can go buy a pair of tights at ALO or whatever for a hundred bucks, but like the same materials available from the Amazon Basics one. Why do they spend so much money? It’s the brand. Maybe you say the cut’s slightly different, whatever, but you know, utilitarian utility wise, it’s the same.

So I think brand matters. And I think that there is an encouragement of speed. And speed wins today. But if you speed run the business into commodity and you’re undifferentiated, you’re a you’re a price cut competitor away. You know? and I think of like do you guys use this brand of cables?

I don’t know how you say it, anchor, anchor, right? It’s like standard, they’re like iPhone cables, batteries, whatever. Like they’re solid. I believe in that brand. I have a Leica camera. I believe in Leica cameras. You know, like that’s a solid brand. Are there better cameras that are out today? Maybe, but like my Leica built in 1985 is like rock solid. It’s a brand that I trust. And as long as the marketer doesn’t screw that up, I think that’s gonna help them.

So I think branding is really important, which is hard for me to say because I’m like partially colorblind and really struggle with design. And then the other part of me says that it’s leads. It’s like people are getting too caught up in the like the joy and the art of building things that they never could before. And they’re doing it at the cost of lead generation. At the end of the day, customers want to consume content from us. They want to binge content. they anything that you’ve bought, you probably Jeff.

If you bought a bike, you probably researched it. You watched YouTube videos, you read the spec sheets, you read the reviews, you read the negative reviews, like you did the whole binge of it before you invested money in it. People are doing that more than ever. If we’re not treating that lead well by giving them bingeable content, giving them more time on brand, and then just generating more leads, everything else kind of beyond that is secondary.

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (47:34.513)
And I think it’s just easy to go to the place where the dopamine is, which is the building of the new thing. And what if we got this new trademark on this new calculator that we can generate through Claude and Webhost? And I don’t know how that works, but it works. And maybe that’ll blow our business up. It’s like the basics matter here. so like those two things, brand versus the basics of like lead generation, and then kind of

applied to it is just speed. We’ve never had more competitors than we have today. We’ve never had more savvy competitors. And we’re talking like I think when we think of competitors, we think of like stateside competitors. But there are plenty of people in like there’s there’s a kid in the in the Philippines right now who’s like living in squalor in Manila who got access to a library computer and he’s developing things

To steal your customers right now. And he has the kind of democratized technology to do that stuff. So we get weak, we slow down. it’s it’s a tough time ahead, I think, with the need for speed, for optimization, with constant

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (48:52.24)
Creation from AI tools. I mean, we didn’t even touch on it, but ChatGPT claimed that ChatGPT six Astra is AGI, which is general intelligence. Like their claim is that it reached ninety-nine point nine percent of the human benchmark. Like, I think we’ll be able to look back in time, Jeff, and say, ooh, Labor Day weekend twenty twenty-six was a massive turning point.

For AGI. Did we reach AGI? Maybe, maybe. Maybe we’re 12 months away. Maybe we’re two years away. I don’t know, but we’re we’re just about there. ChatGPT claimed it first, kind of just to be the first on the moon and say, hey, we were the first ones, you know, in history. And then the guy behind NVIDIA claimed over the weekend that we reached AGI. That’s crazy if we’re really there. So I think that companies that are doing anything online.

anything back office and they’re not leveraging AI tools are probably gonna fall behind. And the margins are gonna grow for those that do and shrink for those that don’t. Yeah, I think there’s a lot at play here.

Jason Mlicki (50:06.22)
Those are tough words, Dead on. All right, man. so where where can people find you?

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (50:12.457)
if you’d like to listen to me talk, you can find me on the Fractional CMO show. I host a weekly podcast there. And if you’d rather read what I write instead of hearing me talk, I write a lot on LinkedIn. You can just find me at Casey Slaughter Stand.

Jason Mlicki (50:27.214)
Thanks for joining us. I really enjoyed

Casey Stanton (CMOx) (50:29.262)
Yeah, thanks guys. Thanks, Jeff.

Jeff McKay (50:29.53)
Thanks, Casey.