Rishi Dave, VR ads, and how AI might not replace marketers — VB Engage

This week, Travis and Stewart discuss Google’s latest lab project — VR ads. Apparently, we can’t escape ads even in our virtual realities. We also talk about some smart AI-powered video solutions and analytics for smart speakers.

Rishi Dave is our guest in this episode, which gives us a chance to be schooled by one of the leading CMOs on everything martech-related, including the future of AI.

By listening to this episode of VB Engage, you will hear:

• Welcome to VB Engage episode 58! [0:10]
• Stewart and Travis hung out in Vancouver at the Unbounce CTA Conference. [01:15]
• CTAConf was a spectacular marketing conference, with some of the top minds in marketing speaking at the event. [02:00]
• We interviewed Unbounce CEO Oli Gardner on the stage in front of 1200+ marketers. [02:20]
• There will be an upcoming series of VB Engage CTAConf interviews with the likes of Mari Smith, Rand Fishkin, Scott Stratton, and Wil Reynolds. [2:45]
• Adobe launches voice analytics for Siri, Alexa, and other intelligent assistants. [03:20]
• Adobe has done a bit of rebranding on its cloud; it has the marketing cloud, the analytics cloud, and the creative cloud. [03:40]
• Adobe Analytics for intelligent assistants tracks metrics like: [04:15]
  • User ID
  • Intent
  • Number of users
  • Number of sessions
  • Session length
  • Frequency of use
  • Error rate
• Frequency of use and error rate are the two the most important metrics in conversational UI. [04:50]
• Google wants to bring advertising into virtual reality with the ad cube. [05:15]
• Google makes 94 percent of its money from advertising — did you think they would not create VR ads? [06:05]
• In VR, there will be few moments when we have buyer’s intent while in VR. [07:20]
• Get your ad blockers ready for the cube! [07:25]
• Google’s AI-powered video analyzer hits public beta this week! [08:35]
• One big use case for this AI video analyzer is with the identification of adult content to help with safe search. [09:30]
• It is getting better at reading emotions. [10:00]
• This will certainly evolve into VR/AR visual analytics. [10:20]
• Back in the day, Travis imagined buying a jacket that Joey was wearing on this one episode of Friends. With this tech, you’ll be able to identify products easily. [11:15]
• When this product identification interface is embedded into AR glasses, buying products will be inspired by real world interactions. [11:35]
• Now let’s chat with Rishi Dave, CMO of Dun & Bradstreet. [12:35]
• Rishi calls himself “the Chief Madness Officer.” [13:30]
• Each week, we discuss something new with artificial intelligence and how that impacts the life of the marketer. [14:20]
• Before we can tackle AI, marketers need to tackle data quality and predictive models for your data. [15:30]
• Marketers are not thinking about their data enough, still. [15:50]
• Start with the data, and leverage third-party data to help you clean up and optimize your data. [16:40]
• Create a master data set by cleaning your data. The DUNS number is the unifying id. [17:15]
• Now you can build models on top of that data with artificial intelligence to gain insights. [17:40]
• How can you better surface those insights? [18:00]
• DnB recently acquired Avention to help with sales acceleration. [19:00]
• Every week, we are covering companies that are using AI in marketing, but none of that matters if your data is bad! [19:20]
• Beyond AI, what can marketers be doing now to get back to being good marketers? [20:05]
• The biggest thing that marketers can do is to accept that change is happening with AI and think about the change management within your organization. [21:00]
• Marketing is madness, and we need more specialists. DnB hires specialists. [21:25]
• Experts like to work within their silos. Rishi creates “Tiger Teams,” cross-functional teams in service of particular customers and personas. [22:10]
• Start to create processes that take advantage of these changes. [22:40]
• Hire people who are not just specialists, but can collaborate. [23:00]
• How can organizations break down the silo between sales and marketing? [23:35]
• If you have a blurred line between sales and marketing, that’s how you know you have effective alignment. [24:35]
• Pipeline doesn’t pay the bills. [25:00]
• Marketing has to metric itself to sales like sales metrics itself to sales. [25:15]
• Joint metrics based on bottom line: sales. [25:30]
• Facial recognition via your AR glasses to gain insights on the people in the room with you is not science fiction. [27:00]
• With Elon Musk’s NeuralLink, we will become sales and marketing cyborgs before we know it! [28:15]

Next week, we chat with the one and only Ben Parr, cofounder of Octane.AI, and he shares with us the secret to a killer Facebook chatbot.

Last week, Travis and Stewart interviewed Damien Mahoney, CEO of Stackla, who tells us everything we need to know about user-generated content, machine learning, AI, and what the future holds for consumer engagement.

As always, thanks for tuning in to VB Engage. Please review it and rate it on your favorite podcast platform. I mean, after all, it’s the least you could do after listening to all of these episodes.

Until next week!