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Happy Friday, folks.
This year's planning deck probably has a slide that moves money out of events and into an AI demand-gen pilot. You may have built it.
OpenAI's own head of B2B marketing for EMEA put field at the top anyway. "Field is the one I would definitely put out as our strongest channel right now," Leila Woodington said on a panel at Semrush Spotlight in London last week, per Adweek. She joined OpenAI more than a year ago to help build its marketing operation.
Most people know the product, she said. That doesn't tell a company how to roll it out to thousands of employees, or persuade the several executives who sign the purchase.
She called it "a complex buying decision that we're influencing," where no single tactic will "persuade the CEO of Fortune 500 companies to buy our technology."
The rooms sit inside a bigger system. A "bench of really carefully curated creators and influencers" gets called in when OpenAI ships something. Business Insider counted OpenAI's sponsored posts promoting ChatGPT on a single social platform doubling, from 61 in June to 122 in July.
And her team runs a fixed calendar, about two webinars a month, that new products get slotted into. "We have a set of activities that are predefined, and then we plug launches into them," she said, instead of "spinning our wheels" on every launch. OpenAI is also building local teams in the markets it sells to.
That's the bit I'd steal first. If your team builds a fresh campaign for every launch, by March the calendar is a pile of one-offs.
CMOs, she said, "seem to expect that I'm completely on top of every single AI technology, at least within our own tools." Her answer: OpenAI is "trying to keep up in the same way as others."
One of the people marketing ChatGPT to businesses in EMEA is keeping up with it like the rest of us, and said so on stage. Which should make your Friday feel a bit better.
So if field is on next year's cut list, what's going to close your deals that need several executives to say yes?
Today’s sponsor:
Yes, that Arnold Schwarzenegger.
He has a newsletter on beehiiv. So do Codie Sanchez, Jay Shetty, David Begnaud, Colin & Samir, and Joanna Stern.
They could publish just about anywhere. They chose beehiiv to build a direct connection with the people who want to hear from them most. And you can do the same, whether you’re world-famous or just at the start of your plan for world domination.
TALK ON THE MARKET
Tom Goodwin, co-founder of All We Have Is Now, on how far companies have gotten with AI, anecdotally:
His second line asks what unequal use does to culture. Today's Numbers show one kind of unequal use. The culture part is still his question.
Want to see case studies of AI-powered campaigns? We publish a daily edition on the most creative use cases of AI in advertising.
Interested in AI innovation across Europe? We publish a weekly round-up on AI-Ready Europe:
NUMBERS MATTER
47% vs 50%. Women and men who say they use AI chatbots, in Pew's analysis published last Friday, from a February survey of 5,119 US adults. In 2024 men were 11 points ahead.
Daily use hasn't caught up: 27% of men, 20% of women. The habit is where the gap lives now.
DAILY PROMPT
Our Event Follow-Up Automation Sequence, for the two weeks after the event:
Create a 5-email follow-up sequence for attendees of a [EVENT TYPE] event held on [EVENT DATE]. Before writing, read the materials I attached ([ATTACHED ASSETS]: session transcript or deck, attendee list with segments, recent email performance export) and check our public site and customer stories so every claim is accurate. Flag anything you cannot verify rather than inventing it. The sequence should span 14 days and include:
## Email 1: Thank You (Send within 24 hours)
- Warm thank you message
- Highlight 2-3 key takeaways from the event, quoted from the transcript
- Include link to event recording or resources
- Call-to-action: Schedule a demo or consultation
## Email 2: Value Reinforcement (Day 3)
- Share a relevant case study or success story
- Connect it to a problem discussed at the event
- Include a downloadable resource (whitepaper, guide, checklist)
- Soft CTA: Learn more about [PRODUCT/SERVICE]
## Email 3: Social Proof (Day 5)
- Feature testimonial or quote from a satisfied customer
- Highlight specific results or ROI
- Include customer logo or company name
- CTA: See how others are succeeding
## Email 4: Educational Content (Day 9)
- Share a relevant blog post, webinar, or tutorial
- Explain how it relates to event discussion
- Provide actionable tips attendees can implement immediately
- CTA: Explore more resources
## Email 5: Final Offer (Day 14)
- Limited-time offer or exclusive discount for attendees, per [OFFER DETAILS]
- Emphasize urgency with expiration date
- Recap key benefits of your solution
- Strong CTA: Claim your offer now
For each email, include:
- Subject line (under 50 characters) and preview text
- Personalization opportunities using [FIRST_NAME], [COMPANY]
- Mobile-friendly formatting
- Unsubscribe option
Tone: Professional yet conversational, focused on value delivery rather than aggressive selling.
Finish with a send calendar table (day, segment, subject line, CTA, source file for each claim) and note where the sequence should branch for [PRIORITY SEGMENT].Attach the session transcript and the attendee list. The room did the persuading. These five emails keep it going.
CMO CORNER
Presence without pressure builds trust faster than reviews.
Turn up when nothing is due. If your team mostly sees you at review time, the review is doing the trust-building, and it's bad at it.
We provide consulting services for CMOs on AI strategy for marketing teams through our Teamless offering.
TOOL UPGRADE
Field starts the deal. Three tools for everything around it:
Riverside — best for teams recording remote interviews and webinars in studio quality, then turning them into transcripts and clips with AI. Try Riverside here →
Close — best for sales teams that want calling, email and SMS in one CRM, with automation keeping follow-up moving. Try Close here →
Seamless — best for sales and field teams building B2B prospect lists from real-time contact data, so the right people get invited. Try Seamless here →
→ We have 300+ curated, filtered, and categorized AI tools in our directory. Browse to find the best ones that help your marketing team.
LEARN THIS
The nearest thing to a seat at the event: 3 Ways to Level Up Your AI Marketing, a 30-minute workshop replay. It covers PACT prompting, AI Marketing ROI and the AIM framework for aligning your team.
→ We publish workshops, courses, guides, manuals, and more on AI marketing for free. Browse our learning resources for free.
BRAND SLOP
Elon Musk's pitch for Grok Bot, SpaceXSI's AI agent: you "can just take a picture of your credit card, drop it in the chat" and it orders for you. X users added a Community Note: "xAI explicitly warns users not to include personal information in prompts".
Then his own demo, a $241 Lego order, showed his shipping and billing addresses, the order email, details of his payment method and the order number, the Statesman reports.
He's since promised "SpaceX will make you whole" if Grok Bot leaks your card. SpaceXSI's terms, per TNW: "We are not responsible for User Content or Agentic Actions." Which of those two sentences would you let into your launch post?
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