Welcome to the Marketing AI SparkCast, where AI meets modern marketing. Hosted by Aby Varma, a global leader in marketing, AI, and innovation, each episode brings you real conversations with leaders putting AI to work in strategy and execution. This episode is brought to you by Spark Novus and the Marketing AI Pulse community. Here's your host, Aby Varma. Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Marketing AI Pulse brief. This is for April 2026. The Marketing AI Pulse community is one of the fastest growing communities focused at the intersection of marketing and AI. And this Marketing AI Pulse monthly brief podcast is to serve that community. If you're not part of the community, we'd love for you guys to join. You can sign up for free at marketingaipulse.com. And for this April episode, as always, we have the lovely Matt Cyr joining us. Hey, Matt. Hey, Aby. How are doing? Happy April. Happy April, my friend. How is everything going in your world? Things are good. Yeah. Keeping busy. We're getting ready for a couple of upcoming events. Unfortunately, we'll have to miss the next Marketing AI Pulse event in in the ATL, but I'll get to the next one after that. Awesome. I am gonna hold you to that, my friend. Alright. Well, let's get on with it. So our first story is really about the creative Martech stack. There is a lot happening in that world. A lot has happened. Today is April 21, but we've just had a lot of developments in the last week, less than a week, I would say. So first off, Anthropic launched Claude Design. It's a new product that lets users collaborate with Anthropic's AI. You can come up with designs, prototypes, slides, one pagers, and more. I've had a chance to play with it and actually create a pitch deck out of it, and it is pretty incredible. There's still some issues exporting it out in Canva. There's been some issues with that. But generally speaking, pretty powerful stuff, especially if you are not a designer, but it works conversationally. And it's like briefing a designer. You can add your company branding system into it. So I've been pretty impressed with that. And speaking of Canva being the design engine behind it, Canva themselves launched Canva AI 2.0, which is the company's biggest launch ever. And they introduced conversational design, agentic orchestration, connectors to Slack, Zoom, HubSpot, Gmail, those sort of things. So a big update on the Canva side of the house. And then this week with Adobe Summit in Las Vegas, today, I believe, is day two. And they announced their CX Enterprise, which is a new end to end agentic AI system designed to manage the entire life cycle from acquiring customers to engaging prospects to driving conversions and loyalty. And then on the creative side, Adobe's new Firefly AI assistant that lets creators describe outcomes in plain language, natural language, and then it orchestrates multistep workflows across Photoshop, Premiere, Lightroom, Illustrator, and more. Right? This is based on the announcement. Obviously, we haven't tried it just yet, but a companion product for... With Adobe was also Adobe Brand Intelligence that learns about your brand and can support with providing feedback and approvals and the evolving picture of what on brand looks like in practice. So a lot of exciting things happening in the world of creative. I think I need to stop and breathe a little bit. Yeah. There's Have you been following all this, Matt? Yeah. And honestly, I've just been watching how even the basic Claude Cowork, how good it's gotten just at designing things like decks. I mean, you mentioned a pitch deck. You know, I worked Claude Cowork this week to develop a a research report, the deck that it output was phenomenal. I mean, it's clean, it's on brand, it's tight, it's really, really well done. And you know, just even going back, let's call it six months, let alone a year, you know, those initial outputs of asking Claude or ChatGPT to spit something out of PowerPoint or whatever, you know, those were comparatively stone age compared to where we are today. So it's it's a really fun time to to be somebody who needs to design something, and the bar is very, very low to entry to get this stuff to work on your behalf. Yeah. Absolutely. I think this sort of opens up the fact that when it comes to ideation or prototyping, can really start using these tools without even having a creative bone in your body. You may not know from an outcome standpoint. You may lack the judgment of whether things are good or bad if you don't have a creative eye, but at least, you know, that things are going to be pretty on brand if you obviously train up the system on your on your fonts and your color palettes and dos and don'ts and that sort of thing. It'll be pretty close. We're really impressed with the Claude Design portion of it. Canva and Adobe, we've not tried it hands on, but it seems pretty impressive. Yep. From a marketing standpoint, we've spoken about things moving towards human beings doing the orchestration part and AI and agents doing the production part of it. Obviously, there's... You gotta give it the brief. You gotta review it on the other side, the human in the loop portion of it, but pretty phenomenal capabilities being developed. Yeah, I worked at an agency for many years and I was not on the design side, I was on the strategy side. Often found, and you alluded to it, but often found like if I had an idea in my head or a concept or a story, needing to translate that into something that a creative person could take and run with was a bit of a process, right? You had to write a brief or you had to try and explain it really clearly. But sometimes that just didn't work. But I think that again, that barrier to entry now is so much lower. You could just work with these tools to get a first draft at something that sort of what's in your head and give that to a creative person and just say, this isn't exactly the way I want it, but it's sort of what I'm thinking about. Can you help me really shape this? I think it just makes that creative process, frankly, so much more successful, but also a lot more fun. Absolutely. And I think from a marketing leader and CMO standpoint, you know, I mean, here's my take on what this means for them, for that audience. So if you guys are listening, I would say step one is take a moment to audit, like, if your brand guidelines are in a PDF format that none of these tools can really access, get your design system standards into a structured, accessible format to make sure that you can start training up these agents and AI systems. The second thing would be knowing when to use which tool. Now what I'm not saying is go buy all of these tools because you're gonna need the whole set. Certainly not. But generally speaking, I feel Claude Design is a great place to go from what you said, brief to visual fast without any kind of a designer, you can then hand it off to your design team, where I know Canva AI 2.0 is the production engine behind Claude Design, so you can open things up in Canva and then polish it and and get things to be more production ready. Adobe has always been the suite of tech for creative professionals in typically an enterprise setting. I think that sort of empowers the enterprise folks to dig in deeper into some of the new capabilities that Adobe has already announced, and I'm sure there's more coming today and this week as part of their AI summit. But their enterprise leaders often tend to have some complex workflows and creative workflows and approval cycles and brain governance and all that kind of stuff, especially across teams and regions and product lines. So I think just having... You know, have a look at your organization, where you fit in, what your needs are, and then evaluate each of these tools to see what is sort of the best fit for your org. So essentially, take a moment, zoom out And evaluate which of these are going to fit the bill for your team. And then finally, I know, Matt, you've spoken about this. I think this also calls for CMOs to even potentially rethink agency balance, right, between the brand and the agencies where, you know, with ideation or mood boards or prototypes and all these things, which have traditionally been a lot of brands would rely on agencies to kinda do some exploration type work. Maybe these are... These tools will now allow in house teams to do some of that stuff. But what is your take on that? Yeah. Totally agree. I mean, I think the the agency client relationship is is obviously shifting in all sorts of ways, but this is a really big one, right? And I think your clients are coming prepared with real power in their hands from a design and strategy perspective. And so I think the days of agencies being the sole proprietor of creativity or creative ideas is really, I think in the past, I think it's now how do you work with an empowered client who's got these tools at their disposal and really bring your strategic capability and your point of view and your cultural understanding to the table. I think it's so important that agencies are flexible in this area and not precious about their their ability to deliver something creative. It's really more about the relationship and the strategy. Yeah. I think it's an exciting time, honestly, for agencies and clients. Yeah. So we are planning... We don't have a day kit, but we're planning a dedicated webinar on all of this creative landscape, Adobe, Canva, Claude Design, Figma. We didn't really speak about Figma in this segment, but we're going to do a dedicated webinar trying to unpack all of this stuff because this topic is so interesting and goes really wide and deep based on the last couple of weeks. It's developed in the last couple of weeks. So we don't have dates yet, but if you sign up for Marketing AI Pulse, you will get notified as soon we have that scheduled. And with that, we are moving on to our next topic, which is agents. We can't seem to get away from them, Matt, but sounds like you're gonna talk about the fact that they could be our new customers. Tell us what you mean. Yeah. Customers and competition, Aby. They are they are increasingly everywhere. Right? That was sort of the word of the year. Last year and even this year agents and agentic AI certainly a big buzzword. But I think what we're finding is that this is becoming more and more real and it's not just about having a new technology in your hands. It's really, really requiring marketers to think differently about the role that AI and agents in particular play. So the impetus for this topic this month was two separate articles that came out, one from Harvard Business Review and one from Boston Consulting Group, each of those within probably about the last month or so, talking about the changing role of marketing in the world where agents are really driving behavior, are driving findability, etcetera. I think we all sort of know this, but it's really good, was really good to see both BCG and HBR talk about the fact that agents are already out there doing a lot of work. They're browsing catalogs, comparing products, initiating purchases without literally having a human being touching a screen. This is something that is a fundamental shift in how we have to think about commerce and really about everything we do online. The idea that agents are doing a lot of this on our behalf. We talked about Claude and Claude Cowork earlier. The agent capabilities within that tool are incredibly powerful, getting more so every day. So increasingly we're seeing agents doing the work on behalf of humans, of course humans coming in at a certain point in the conversation to make a final decision, to make a purchase, etcetera. But I think really critically, marketers need to be in the position of thinking about agents as both, again, both the customer and as competition because they are gonna be doing a lot of the discovery and a lot of the early work on behalf of your customers. So as an example, right, we just saw there was a big announcement this week actually from Salesforce talking about their not just doubling down, but tripling and quadrupling down agents and autonomous agents, those that can do work on behalf of the user. But the results of these agentic behaviors are also really, they're showing real value, right? A three to five times email click through rate improvements reductions in, excuse me, 20 to 30 reductions in cost per pipeline among early adopters. And interestingly, think there's some new KPIs that are emerging, one of which is called share of model, which is the idea that you need to understand how well your brand is showing up in these large language models and other agentic tools. Long story short is we are entering a place where the agents are gonna be operating on our behalf, but that doesn't relinquish control or responsibility for the human, right? I think a big question here that brands have to ask themselves is how much am I willing to allow an AI agent to do on my behalf? Which of course gets into governance and really raises the question of how does our brand show up in the marketplace? How are we allowing these agents to work and do things on our behalf, but also critically, how are they showing up to our customers when they're searching? So a lot to really unpack here. Aby, have you been seeing many of your clients wrestling with this, the sort of put the work of agents out in the marketplace? Are they thinking about it? Are they talking about it yet in your world? Absolutely. I think that it's on pretty much everybody's mind, and we have actively been working with our clients to really think about this stuff because I think marketers and CMOs have a lot to think about on what does that mean, you know, from their brand standpoint. Does that mean, for example, is my website agent scannable friendly? Yeah. Because we wanna make sure that your brand doesn't get excluded when you have prospects firing off agents who are scanning your website and that of your competitors. You wanna make sure your, you know, website is, quote, unquote, agent friendly. It's an early emerging area, but that's just an example. But what's your take, Matt? How should CMOs and marketers really be thinking about it, and what are actionable things that they can do right now? Yeah, there's a lot. I mean, that's the good news, right? I think you just touched on it a little bit, but I think what's interesting about these agents scanning your sites and evaluating your products is that it's a really different action, right? This is, we're we're noticing that on the the human side, consumers are wanting much more context. They're having much more conversational searches. They're looking for a user generated content that can help them see that there's real humans behind some of these decisions. So on the one hand, have a changing nature of search and finding on the human side, but on this agentic side, you really have to adjust adjust your materials to really speak to these agents, right? One thing that CMOs could do today is audit your data infrastructure for agent readiness. You touched on this just a second ago, but you have to structure your data really cleanly, right? If you have APIs, they need to be really clean and sleek. Your schema markups need to be in good shape. And in general, your data has to be in a good place. Mean, this is something you and I have talked about many times. Data is the core of AI and makes it work or not. So get your data in order. And as Boston Consulting Group said in their report, machine readable brand signals are the first strategic priority, which is really a sort of a complex way of saying like, make sure that you're really clear about who you are, what you sell, what you mean to the world, and do it in a way that the agents can consume easily and quickly. Only tangible thing that folks can do is pick one workflow to go fully agentic in the next ninety days. There's lots of different opportunities to do this. Audience segmentation, paid media optimization, two really easy places to start, but allow the, this process to be fully run by agents. Keep the test narrow, keep it focused, have really clear goals of what you want to accomplish, but really let the agents do their work so you can understand how they work and what you find and what you learn through that process. I think there's just a real value in just letting these tools do what they do best. You and I actually talked to the CEO of an AI company last year and his company does paid media purchasing. And we asked him like, how is your tool most successful? And he said, just leave the AI alone and let it do its job. And so I think that's something that I would recommend that marketers do in these agentic tests. And then finally new KPIs we know are emerging every day in the world of AI, but this new one and I mentioned it a little bit earlier, is share of model I think is one that folks need to really start to pay attention to. How are you showing up? How often? For what kinds of things, are they the kinds of things you wanna be found for, but really have a strategy for Claude and for ChatGPT and Perplexity and all the other tools out there because people are increasingly using them to find information, products, recommendations, that kind of good stuff. So a lot of really exciting things happening, but I would say the biggest tool or the biggest point I would make is get started now. Don't wait for this to settle because you'll be too far behind by the time this thing settles. Awesome. Thank you for that. Very insightful. What's up next? Well, one of the places that you and I spend a lot of our time is on LinkedIn. It's been a great place for us to find community and connection and content. But it now looks like AI is is coming for LinkedIn and vice versa. And why don't you tell us what they're up to? Yeah. LinkedIn has always been a destination for most businesses when it comes to content. And we now have some research. So Semrush did... Took data from 90,000 URLs cited across AI engines, and, really, LinkedIn emerged as the number two domain being cited in those answers. So AI is summarizing LinkedIn content. This really means your brand narrative is being shaped inside of AI before prospects reach your website. That's obviously the the gist of AI search and brand discovery in AI search. But if your team is not publishing and your competitors are influencing how your category and brand are defined, then you are in trouble. So essentially, authority is shifting beyond your website to these sort of distributed voices across platforms, especially and more importantly, LinkedIn. If you don't have... A lot of people may not have an active strategy on LinkedIn because they think it's just social media. It's not just social media because it is really impacting AI brand discovery in a big way. And I think from a CMO standpoint, I would really advise CMOs to treat LinkedIn as a strategic channel, not just a social media strategy. Really, it's got a bigger role in terms of getting your brand discovered on LLMs. If you don't have your executives on LinkedIn, it's a great, great time, I'd say, to start thinking about activating your executives on LinkedIn and make sure they have a pretty healthy cadence of publishing consistently on LinkedIn. Define and reinforce the core topics that you want AI to associate with your brand, and then obviously measure and improve LinkedIn's algorithm changes rewards brands and people that post on a regular basis. So I think that is... Definitely goes without saying. The second thing I would say is making sure useful and helpful content is super important. So obviously, there's a lot of promotional type things that people post. We do too. But I think making sure that you're really posting things that are helpful to people, share some knowledge, provide some insights, in that case, I think helps with improved engagement. And then the third thing I'm seeing is much like some of the more visual channels like TikTok and Instagram, there is certainly an increase in expectation of a video on LinkedIn, and I'm seeing that. Especially for video content, there is a lot of engagement from people who are not followers. So that is a really interesting aspect of it. But all of this boils down to the word you use, authentic, real. And to me, that should really be an active personal brand strategy, company brand strategy that everybody should follow. So something to really keep in mind, and that is a great segue, Matt, into our next story. I think brands are really embracing real and authentic. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah. It's interesting, right? I mean, the world is a pendulum swing, is always filled with pendulum swings, and I think this is a good example of it. Just within the last couple weeks, we've seen some pushback from advertisers on the use of AI in their advertising, right? I think you're starting to see a focus on the word real, right? And that not AI generated and things like that. And this is more than just a blip. I think a wave of major brands have been coming out in the last several weeks and months really tuning into that consumer anxiety about AI generated content and using the opposite of that to connect with people and to sort of turn, not turn their backs on AI, but to turn away from that and toward a more authentic, engaged human type of advertising. So there's a lot of examples of this. And I think part of what's been... Actually, sorry, that part again. And this is not just about advertising, right? There's a lot of pushback happening in a lot of areas in AI. There are really sort of scary and dangerous things like someone throwing a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's home a week or two ago, but there's also this push toward wanting to have the humanity and the human beings come through in advertising. And some really specific examples in the last few weeks, you may have seen during the Super Bowl, which is now more than a few weeks ago, but the famous Jonas Brothers were in an Almond Breeze commercial where they sort of made fun of AI generated content and made a point of saying that they were creating something real and human. Equinox launched a question everything but yourself campaign that that talked about really looking at the value of real people and and sort of spinning away from AI generated content. Aerie generated some buzz when Pamela Anderson was involved in a campaign with them, making a pledge that they would not use AI generated people or bodies in their campaign. And that paid off for them immediately, right? Their sales in Q4 at the end of last year jumped 23% year over year becoming their most popular ad campaign. So a lot of brands pushing back on the use of AI generated content. But the interesting twist here to me is that this is not the brands also saying that they are anti AI. A lot of these brands have come out themselves and said that in fact they are in favor of AI, in favor of using it in smart ways. In fact, Almond Breeze used AI tools to make the ads that mocked the use of AI in making ads. So we're living in this kind of strange place, but I do think there is a connection that people are feeling to the human side of things and to the creativity and turning away from AI generated media and advertising. So it's something that I think is gonna continue. I think people are embracing ways that the human being can come through while benefiting from all the benefits that AI can bring to the table. But I'm assuming, Aby, you're probably seeing this every day when you're putting together an agenda for an AI Pulse event. How are the people that you're talking to thinking about the use of AI in advertising, but also, think more importantly, the use of human beings and human related elements. Absolutely. I think the key thing is context. Right? Context makes all the difference on on how AI is used, how it is received, how your brain is perceived. So, you know, if you really wanna make sure that you have authentic content and real content... I mean, we put out as part of Marketing AI Pulse, we interview people, get them on video, and put that content out. It is 100% real. Do we use AI for editing? Absolutely. Right? So it'll speed up the editing process, but the content is really real. So I think that sort of context makes a lot of difference. And so I think for a lot of marketing folks, that's a challenge. Synthetic content is not wrong as long as it is used in a way which is true to your brand values. It is not, you know, quote, unquote, AI slop. Certainly, leveraging AI from production workflows is a smart way of doing it, but making sure that what's on camera or the words being used and those sort of things are in alignment with your brand values. And I've seen a 100% synthetic UGC content, but that's where I think brands have to ask themselves. Then if you have UGC user generated content, which is sort of talking about your brand, that's really fake. Right? Because that person doesn't exist. Is that in alignment with their brand values or not? On the other end of the spectrum, I've seen, you know, CMOs who have an opinion that, hey. Prior to AI, you had models doing commercials, and that wasn't real, and everybody knew that. So I think it's sort of a slippery slope, but I do see that line moving. I think, in effect, everybody's realizing that, hey. AI, when leveraged in the right context in the right way with, you know, humans in the loop is sort of a a smart way of doing it. As long as your brain values and sort of your brain voice remains authentic and remains real, I think people are gonna be accepting of that. Yeah. You know, and you you brought up an interesting point about, you know, models being part of ad campaigns and and people understanding that those are, you know, are not quote, unquote real people. But I think there's a real push where people are asking questions like, that an AI model? Is that dress gonna fit me the way it's supposed to if that's not a real person? How can I really gauge whether that is true sizing or whatever? And I think there's just an inherent question that consumers are asking more and more. I hear it all the time. Oh, that's just AI. And I think there's a dismissiveness about that, that brains have to be really careful about, right? Yes, there are benefits of having AI help out in various ways. And to your point, as long as people are clear about how they're using AI, I think it's okay. But you don't want to undercut the trust and the belief that your customers have in you by using AI in sort of reckless or unannounced ways. I think it's just going to really rode that value and that trust that people have. And so I'll just leave CMOs with a couple of thoughts here. It's really important, I think, to define your AI content policy before a campaign forces you to, right? Aerie, I mentioned them earlier, they built internal operational standards first. They made their decision to not include any AI generated people in their campaigns first and then went public with that. You have to have these discussions and make these rules before you start putting things out there. So a really important first step is to really own that, right? And the last thing I would say here is auditing your highest trust touch points for AI exposure. Look at your product pages, your campaign images, testimonials, anywhere that your customer is going to be trying to determine the veracity of what you make, what you sell and who you are, make sure that that is representing the authenticity and the realness that you want as a brand. Again, you have to align on what that is and different brands are gonna have different lines. But really do that first, do that work first and don't wait for the market to tell you that you've made a mistake or that they're leaving you because of some way that you've used AI that they don't like. So it's it's a fascinating time to be a to be a marketer. And, you know, it's really important to keep an eye on authenticity. And speaking of which, Aby, I think you wanna talk to us a little bit about the answer engine optimization. Yeah. AEO, GEO, e I e I o. I don't know what people are calling it these days, but, yeah, interesting development. Last week, HubSpot announced an AEO product. It's a new product that tracks how your brand appears inside ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and so on and so forth, and provides recommendations on how your brand can be discovered better. This is obviously... This field is hot right now. There is a lot of interest, a lot of new technology players within this space. But to me, this is meaningful because HubSpot acquired a company called XFunnel last year, I believe, in October. And it's a... It was a AI cert startup, and it is now part of the HubSpot ecosystem. And the very fact that, you know, HubSpot has got such kind of a deep penetration within marketing communities, This makes it super relevant. And I think the data behind the launch, honestly, is hard to ignore because based on HubSpot's own research, you know, organic search traffic for HubSpot customers dropped about 27% year over year. Right? And HubSpot's own CEO, Yamini, said that people are asking questions in places like GPT and Gemini, and the companies that show up in these answers are the ones that are winning. So huge a huge development in making sure that brands start understanding what their brand presence looks like in LLMs, and that tech stack is getting wider and wider. And just a reminder that Semrush, which has been sort of default platform for a lot of SEO initiatives, has also launched capabilities of figuring out your brand discovery in LMs. And Adobe announced their intent to acquire Semrush. Right? So... But this space is getting really competitive. And from a marketing standpoint or CMO standpoint, what that means is make sure that you are really spending time and investing in technologies where you have a very clear understanding of how your brands are gonna get discovered in your category. Find tools that will make sure that you have a very clear understanding on your brand and the NLMs. What comes back is gonna tell you where you stand, so some sort of a baseline before you spend a dollar on optimizing that. And unlike SEO, a lot of GEO techniques for optimizations are based on first party research that these technology providers are doing. Right? So there isn't kind of like what Google Search Console used to be for traditional SEO. There isn't something like that yet for AEOGEO. But I'm sure somebody is already thinking about that. But what that really means is that based on the research that these platforms, like in this case, HubSpot's AEO engine was gonna surface up, you would have a very good understanding of where your brand is cited. So AI citations, direct answers, FAQ formats, third party mentions, all those things, which carry more weight than traditional SEO engines in the world of LLMs, you will have a very good understanding of that. And then make sure you're allocating resources to make sure that you that you are actively improving all of that stuff. And lots of research which now talks to freshness of content. Right? Obviously, making sure technically your content is correct and you have FAQs and these LLMs are are searching or indexing your content, and your content's getting cited on it. But making sure that there's a resurgence, not like PR ever went away, but there's certainly a resurgence and a new emphasis on third party mentions. So a lot of PR, digital PR, is going to start becoming super important for brands in order to facilitate AI brand discovery. So... And remember, the the... One of the previous stories we just spoke about was LinkedIn. So you now see PR and social media and web indexability, and all of these things start pick... Playing a hue... Huge role in your brands discovering it. And some of these tools like the HubSpot AEO engine is going to make it easier for brands to really start pivoting and making sure that they are gonna start starting to influence the narrative on how those brands are showing up on NLMs. Unlike the traditional Google SEO world where you wanted to make sure you're on the first page, you land it on your website, then you control the narrative. In this case, you don't control the narrative. It is controlled by a lot of third party sources. So interesting development in making sure that marketers start paying attention to it because definitely one of the key channels for brand discovery we just cannot be ignored. Yeah. Absolutely. So, Matt, this was the organic side of things, organic brand discovery, but let's move into our last story in the world of paid brand discovery in LLMs, ChatGPT specifically. Sounds like the bar just got lower. Yeah. It's interesting, Ray. You can't really have an AI conversation without talking about ChatGPT somewhere along the way. And so we'll squeeze this one in here at the end. I think most marketers who are listening here will remember that OpenAI launched their advertising pilot in February of this year, starting to talk about ways that marketers could use their tool, their channel for growing their brands, getting that visibility in the LLMs. But that has very rapidly expanded to the point now that just within the last week or two, OpenAI has really increased its focus on advertising. The pilot that they started in February crossed $100,000,000 in annualized revenue by late in March and expanded internationally. So a really quick growth and I think sort of speaking to that sort of demand that people are feeling is pent up. But the week of the April 7, they really dropped that barrier to entry. The minimum spend started at $200,000 in that initial pilot. OpenAI dropped that to $50,000 earlier this month, and then also launched a self serve ad manager. And then just last week announced a shift to click based billing. So a lot of things that are making ChatGPT much more accessible to a much wider audience. I think at first with that $200,000 entry point, it was really sort of a large scale enterprise channel. But now I think with this reduction in minimum spend, self serve capabilities, click based billing, It makes it that much easier for smaller mid market brands to get involved here and to try this out. It's it's become so much simpler for people. And I think as we've been talking about throughout this entire episode, these are channels that cannot be ignored anymore. It's not just about, I'm going to go try ChatGPT. It's really about having a strategy and approach and a mindset for how you're going to do it. Because this is different than traditional search ads. I mean, we all know this inherently, but the primary difference is that users have already expressed their intent in these channels. They've already said, we do this all the time, right? You've got a really long query that you're asking the LLM, you're having a conversation with it, you're sort of narrowing the information that you're trying to find through that conversation. And so you've got a very teed up, very ready consumer. You have to be ready as a brand to anticipate that and meet their specific needs. So context matching I think is really important. Conversational approach, trust, all the things that we've been talking about today are just really, really important. And I think one of the interesting things for marketers who are looking not just at where we are today, but as where we are going go for the rest of this year and then certainly into '27 and beyond, is that the folks that are trying out ChatGPT and all the other tools like Perplexity and others that are having advertising, is that the folks that are doing it now are really establishing what good performance looks like, right? They're the ones who are establishing the new KPIs. And I think blade entrants will be the ones who are going to inherit that data in those KPIs that they didn't really help set. So a good reason, I think, for folks to get in. And as I would say to CMOs who are wondering what they can and should be doing is get into this now at a modest spend level. You don't have to go all in and spend millions of dollars or even hundreds of thousands of dollars anymore to do this. Set aside a little bit of your budget, use it as a learning budget to test, learn and iterate, the classic marketing learning scale. Try that out and make sure that you're learning from that process as best as you can. And then finally, I would say is use this again as a unique channel. Have custom creative briefs that you're creating just for ChatGPT ads because the content needs to be different. And so write briefs with that in mind so that your writers and your other creatives have in mind that this is a different channel that they need to handle a little bit differently. So, you know, very packed month here, Aby. We've we've covered quite a lot of ground here in the last hour or so. Any last words you want to leave folks with here? I would just ask marketers who have not institutionalized AI within their marketing organization, you really have to make sure that you start looking at it in kind of a strategic way. If you're not doing that, definitely take time to start paying attention and making it a horizontal layer across all aspects of marketing. So, with that, thank you very much to our listeners. You can follow Matt and me on LinkedIn, and you can follow the Marketing AI Pulse community at marketingaipulse.com. Matt, thank you for another awesome episode. Yeah. Thank you. We'll see you next month. Thanks for listening. Big thanks to Spark Novus and the Marketing AI Pulse community. You can join the community at marketingaipulse.com.
