‘B2B can stand for brilliant to beautiful’: Salesforce CMO, Scott Larson explains why empathy is so important in marketing
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00:00I don't think people wake up and think about CRM and customer 360 relationships and things
00:05like that in sort of the sexiest of ways, but I'm a big believer, whether it's, you
00:11know, people think that B2B needs to be boring to blah, right?
00:16And I'm a big believer that B2B can stand for brilliant to beautiful.
00:19I'm happy as a creative, if you gave me a rock to come up with ideas, I get so excited
00:23I'd lock myself up in a room for a week coming up with ideas to sell a rock.
00:27As far as whether it can be creative or not, I think people at the end of the day, human
00:31beings enjoy storing stories.
00:34And I always like to think that while technology is timely, storytelling is timeless.
00:38And today it's AI and data, tomorrow it might be holograms and telepathy.
00:43So whatever it is, though, storytelling is timeless.
00:46And I think at the end of the day, whether you're B2B, B2C, I think it's B2P, business
00:50to people, because people like stories.
00:53When people worry that AI is going to take their job, and it's a huge concern, I truly
00:59believe that AI is going to make humans relate to humans even closer.
01:03And what I mean by that is when it comes to coming up with an idea and using AI, the definition
01:08of an idea in my point of view is there's nothing new in the universe, right?
01:12So the definition of a new idea is taking two things that already exist and putting
01:16them together to create something new.
01:18When you're using AI, you have to prompt and tell the AI to do that.
01:21So you have to have that idea.
01:23You have to say, I want to combine this with this, and then AI spits it out.
01:26Now, the hallucinations in AI are why we're not there yet.
01:30Because when you put two things together to create something new, often you'll get a flying
01:34pig over here and a rooster with a goat body over here and things like that.
01:38So we're not totally there yet with it, but it always is going to take a human being with
01:43a creative idea or vision to kind of steer this thing around to get what you want.
01:48It's just a tool.
01:49I'll give you an example.
01:50We've got a campaign running right now called Ask More of AI.
01:53And we've got Matthew McConaughey, you know, set in the wild because AI is the Wild West,
01:57so he's dressed like a sheriff.
01:58And we were making the commercial, and we were using AI because we thought how meta
02:03that would be, to use AI in the commercial about AI.
02:07And we were running these Wild West scenes through the AI generator through stable diffusion,
02:12and it would take about four hours to run through a 15-second video clip.
02:16And what would pop out would be a five-legged horse standing on a barn sideways, or cactuses
02:21floating in the sky.
02:23But one of the mistakes in the hallucinations had Matthew walking away from camera, and
02:29all of a sudden he began to turn into this weird cactus man.
02:33It's an idea none of us had, and we couldn't have thought of it, but we were like, well,
02:38that's really twisted and weird, but cool, let's put it in a spot.
02:41So these happy accidents or these hallucinations can actually add value, too, if you know how
02:46to look for them and embrace them when they happen.