Ep #143: What Leadership Looks Like in the Age of AI

Transcript​

In this episode, I’m gonna talk to you about the missing quality that you must have in order to find better clients as a fractional CMO and serve them for a long time. I’m talking about years, so you’re not cycling through clients all the time and reinventing yourself. Let’s do it.

Marketers of the world, why do we work hard to solve small problems? Why do we reinvent ourselves and our clients over and over and why are we giving away marketing strategy for free?

With advancements in AI, we’re all seeing the marketing department shrink from the bottom up and companies need you to serve them as their fractional chief marketing officer. It’s time to solve bigger problems and bring home a bigger paycheck. It’s time to create the lifestyle we deserve and to make a greater impact.

This is the Fractional CMO Show and I’m Casey Stanley. Join me as we explore this growing industry and learn to solve bigger problems as marketing leaders.

The Fractional CMO Show is sponsored by CMOX, the number one company to teach you how to attract, convert and serve high paying fractional CMO clients on your terms.

Hey, it’s Casey, welcome back to the Fractional CMO Show and I wanna tell you about something that I think that you’re probably missing as you think about your career as a fractional CMO.

Now for me, I think of myself as a fractional CMO. I’ve got the CMOX Accelerator, but I am a fractional CMO. This is where I think I will always be useful. This is where I will always be able to find clients that pay me more money, that are more fun to work with, that solve big problems, that I can continue to dig into and really help and serve.

And the longer I stay in the game, the better I am at finding these clients.

And I wanna give you a bit of a heuristic on what you should be looking for when you’re looking at clients.

And the word is leadership.

That’s what I wanna talk to you about today, is leadership. And I wanna tell you about why, and I wanna tell you about what’s happening with AI and why leadership is needed and where you can find roles that need leadership and things like that.

But the word is leadership.

The word isn’t strategy or AI tinkerer or builder of AI tools or the person who spends nights and weekends building a $29 a month SaaS tool and they’re never gonna sell it because the moment that it’s finished, they solve the problem in their own mind and they got all the dopamine that they wanted and now they can move on to the next thing, which is an infinite loop of developing things that nobody wants.

If that’s you, I’m sorry, maybe shots fired, but here’s what I’m seeing.

Companies need a leader. They need a competent leader. They need someone who’s gonna show up every single day and lead the team. They need someone who has responsibility.

So let me tell you what that’s like.

Years ago, I lived in New Orleans and I remember right when I moved to New Orleans, I went out to the Camilla Grill or the Camilla Diner. I think it was off Royal Street, if you know that in New Orleans. It’s a road towards the river from Bourbon Street and Royal Street, it’s a lovely street. It’s where there’s art galleries and it’s not Bourbon Street, but it’s also close to Bourbon Street. So it still has that same fun.

I really like Royal and there was this great grill on it. I’m sure it’s still there.

I remember just sitting at the grill, hanging out and I sat next to a couple and I was just chatting with them. Long story short, the guy was the CEO of ExxonMobil.

Think of that, the CEO of ExxonMobil.

And I was like, man, I probably can ask him one smart question. What’s my smart question to ask him? And I was just like going through some questions and chatting with him and his wife and they were on vacation and doing whatever.

And he went to the bathroom and I turned to his wife and I had remembered the Deepwater Horizon oil spill that happened in 2010. And I asked her, I was, did you see the CEO during that time?

And she was like, yes, he was.

And I said, what was that like? What was it like to be the CEO? And she just went on to share just how difficult it was for him.

Now, some of you listening, who cares about an oil company guy who’s making a ton of money? Yeah, okay.

But that company in that moment needed a leader.

That was this guy. He was the guy. He was who’s on TV? Who’s in front of Congress? Who is the government coming after? Who’s the spokesperson? It’s the CEO.

Now, is he the guy who was on the tanker that had the leak? No, he wasn’t. He wasn’t there. He was probably wearing a suit and tie, never getting his hands dirty with oil in his whole life. Yet he was the guy that kind of had to own up to the mistake.

There’s a reason that there’s a CEO in a business, especially a business like that. The reason is that they need someone to be responsible and to navigate and hopefully not let the company do bad stuff. But ultimately he was the responsible party.

And there’s value in that lesson.

He had a really bad couple months. And sure, there was absolutely devastated communities in Louisiana and Alabama and Mississippi and probably Florida that had oil all over. Seafood and all the animals had died. There’s a ton of bad stuff that happened. But this guy had to step up and be the human component to take responsibility.

And again, as much as humans take responsibility for oil spills, they probably don’t do it well enough. But he was still the leader. He still sat in the role of the leader.

And that is an interesting thing for us to think about.

There was a consequence to that that had to be paid out from the oil companies. I think I said Exxon early on. I’m pretty sure it was BP. He was the president of BP. Or the CEO of BP. But here he is taking a sense of responsibility at least as much as his lawyers authorized him to do, whatever. But he had to be the person, the spokesperson for the brand.

And the value in the story is that companies, there are companies that need that level of leadership. And then there’s those companies that don’t.

There are some companies that are just running an offer. They’re just liquidating a supplement on the internet. And it’s fine. It’s a fine business and it’s profitable. But that doesn’t need a human component necessarily.

And as I think of the long arc of what’s happening with AI and how things are shifting, how we’re seeing more automation taking over roles and then more agentic use of AI taking over those automations to oversee them and ensure that they’re doing the right things. As we see all of that stuff, there are a lot of companies that I think are by no means are they less profitable. They might be very profitable. But I just don’t think that they have the lasting power for the CMO.

If your model is testified before Congress, be the spokesperson of, be the person that is responsible for all things marketing. If it is merely the company requiring marketing, they don’t need a CMO. But if instead they need someone responsible for marketing, there’s room for you.

I hope you’re starting to see that kind of split.

So an easy one is, does a doctor’s office, does a OBGYN, does a dentist need a CMO? Or do they just need leads of high quality patients? They just need leads, that’s it. They just need leads.

Okay, now expand that. What if it’s a dental practice with three dentists? Do they need a CMO? No, they still just need leads.

Okay, what if it’s 25 practices with 50 dentists? Okay, now they need more than leads. They need someone who’s responsible. They need a leader inside of the department.

These dentists that are dental owners or employees or whatever, they want someone to in some ways blame when marketing doesn’t do well. They want a sense of responsibility. They want a line of responsibility that they can audit and say, oh, it’s bad strategy and we should blame Casey for that or it’s bad execution and Casey shares this or whatever.

At some level of complexity in the business, there is probably a need for a CMO.

Too many of you are playing too small. That’s the takeaway. You’re playing too small, you’re thinking too small. They don’t need a CMO because the problems are a lead problem. The problems are a booking problem.

I think gone are the days when you can be the CMO whose whole job is to bring in a media buyer and then to sit on the sales team’s calls and just be like, hey, guys, you’re not calling fast enough. We have a speed to lead problem. That’s not the role of the CMO these days. The role of the CMO is much more comprehensive. It’s much more detailed and it involves a significant sense of leadership.

So as we think of AI, we know that Meta’s AI platform that they purchased, Manus, I don’t know how to say it. What would you call it? Manus or Manus, your call? I wouldn’t have called it that. Okay, if it’s Manus, let’s just call it that for fun.

We see that Manus can allow us to manage ad accounts. Meta’s own AI tool lets us manage Meta’s AI accounts. I don’t need a media buyer and a strategist in the same way I used to.

ChatGPT images too, is that what it’s called? I think maybe there’s a more sophisticated name for it. But holy cow, are those images good.

Claude.ai slash design, really strong for making design stuff. I was really excited about Claude design and then I just started playing a little bit with ChatGPT image too and I’m really impressed with that. And I think for a lot of things, ChatGPT image too is going to be superior to Claude design but Claude design’s probably better for additional iteration and fine tuning.

The advertising space is shrinking from the bottom up. I don’t need the same people I used to need. I don’t need the content writers because I can just ask Claude to rip a bunch of headlines and then I can use my taste in discernment and choose them instead of sitting down and writing. I can just choose the ones that I’ll maybe rewrite a little bit and then for ad creative, I can have Claude design rip it or I can have ChatGPT image too do it.

It’s just easier and easier.

So if that’s my role as the CMO and I’m just responsible for leads but no leadership, I just think that the role in those organizations is going to be short lived.

And again, too many of you are focusing on these short lived opportunities. You’re saying, oh, I can go in with this client and I can manage some ad stuff and help them get leads and that’ll be the turnaround that they need.

What about, what’s a whole 360 of it all? Start adding in other components. What about resellers, affiliates, partnerships? What about creating content, video content with actual humans in it?

When you start going down that path, hosting live events, attending events as a sponsor, that level of complexity needs a true leader and not simply a, just a marketer in the seat of it.

I can go find a marketer anywhere. I can go to Upwork and I can find anything I want. I can find any talent I want. The problem is that talent is transactional and doesn’t provide a lasting, durable, robust outcome for me and my clients.

It provides a design. Oh, I wanna get a poster design. I go to Upwork, I find someone, he’s in Pakistan, 30 bucks, I get a beautiful poster designed and then the relationship’s over and then I close out the contract and he gets paid. That’s fine but there’s no leadership there.

With meta ads, let’s say Manus is running ads because you’ve authorized it to have control over the ad account or maybe you tie in some open claw, gen spark, whatever and you build out this thing that’s iterating on its own AI implementation of ads in meta or Google or Rumble or Truth Social or whatever you wanna do for ads. Okay, that stuff can all happen.

The question then is who’s responsible, who’s leading the charge, who’s the big idea person, who’s left before Congress defending BP?

That’s the question.

Are you that guy or not? Are you that woman? Are you that person who’s gonna stand there and be responsible?

You’re paid more because you get better outcomes but also because you’re responsible for the outcomes.

I remember the first time I ever really increased my rates. I increased it by 50% was for a company because I didn’t need the business, life was really great, we had just had our first kid and I had a great deal that came in and the company was just let us hire you. We won’t really wanna hire you and I just named it right that was 50% higher than I had charged before.

And to these guys, the cost of not having you is far greater than the cost of having you so you’re hired, can you start on Monday?

That’s the consideration here, right? The leadership, the amount of protection I provided was more valuable than my cost.

So for some of you, your whole magic is, I’m gonna come in and do a rebrand. Well, a rebrand doesn’t last long.

We’ve got one of our members in the accelerator. He’s doing a big rebrand for a client, trucks wrapped, clipboards, shirts, stickers, the whole thing, big. I don’t know their full price but probably over a half million dollars and it’s taking forever to roll out because the local wrapping company for the trucks can only do one truck every two weeks or something. I don’t remember the numbers but it’s a lot of money and it’s taking a lot of time.

But at some point, that’s gonna be done with. And if he was just the branding CMO, he’s losing the business. They’re gonna be like, thank you very much. We’re satisfied with the brand. We won’t be renewing our contract because all you’re gonna do is more brand stuff.

So my question to you is, how do you become lasting and valuable and stick around with your clients?

Just leadership.

In the last episode, I think I shared this big idea of, we’re in the age of $6 Uber rides. Do you remember that? The idea here being that Uber used to be six bucks. I used to be able to get across town for a couple bucks during rush hour and it was, why wouldn’t I use Uber? And then Uber started pushing the prices up and then Lyft came in and we started using Lyft and Lyft pays their people better so we’d like Lyft more. And now today, my ride on a Lyft or an Uber can far exceed the cost of calling a taxi.

And the reason is because I’m probably now paying at least the true cost of that ride that was previously subsidized by private equity. Bunch of rich people out in California were subsidizing those rides for me. So every time I took a $6 Uber ride, it was really a $30 Uber ride and they ate $24 of it in order to buy me as a customer.

That was cool.

With Compute, we just saw that. As I record this a couple days ago, Claude, when Thropik, they came out and said, hey, so when we released Claude Code and stuff, we weren’t really thinking it would take off like it did and we’re reevaluating our models and we’re testing this thing where Claude Code is not available on the $20 a month plan.

Now I don’t know if they’ve rolled that back or not. Maybe they’ve just limited the token use significantly, but they’re pulling away functionality.

Consider that. They’re pulling away the functionality of their models so the AI isn’t as good as it used to be. And if you want the AI, it’s just more money.

I pay the $200 a month for Claude Code and I play with it still. On average, probably two hours a day since, geez, it’s been a while. For almost three months, about seven days a week, I’m just always on it. I really am enjoying learning about a bunch of stuff and building a bunch of stuff. And I’m not even really scratching the edge of what’s possible, but I know other people with maybe their code bases are more significant or maybe poor prompting or inappropriate use of MCPs or something, they’re just blowing through all their tokens pretty quickly and the $200 a month isn’t enough for them.

We’re seeing the cost of compute go up. We will continue to see the cost of compute to go up.

We’re also seeing the nerfing of models. It’s a joke now, some of these models. I saw a meme this morning and someone’s, responding to everything like Claude does. Your spouse says, honey, the dishes. Said, yes, I did the dishes. And then they reply, but why are they still dirty? And you say, you’re right, they are still dirty. I’m sorry I said that. I should have said I didn’t do them. Right, that’s the world that we know.

To me, I’ve got a little bit of taste around chat-cheap nerfing. So nerfing refers to the weakening. Think of an actual gun shooting people versus a nerf gun shooting people. A nerf gun is foam darts. It is a nerfed version of a gun. So a nerf, the nerfing of the model is happening. We’re all seeing it in real time and it sucks. And there’s not much you can do about it.

You could go play and say, Claude, Opus, Six-Seven is nerfing. Are we on Six-Seven? I haven’t heard enough Six-Seven jokes in my house about that yet. My son is at the age where Six-Seven’s a thing right now. Okay, so maybe we’re, this model, Six, I think we’re at six-four, six-five. Is that where we’re at? It doesn’t even matter.

The current model feels like a nerfed version. Couple months ago it felt a lot smarter. I was doing things right. Would fix something and not break something else while it fixed the first thing. It just feels like a smarter model in the past. And now there’s an updated model that might be actually smarter, but it might be nerfed. So it might be acting dumber. I don’t know.

So you might say, okay, why Claude is nerfed? Then let’s move over to Codex and use Claude code, but switch our models. Let’s add a plugin where I say slash codex review. And then Codex will review the code that Claude wrote. These things you can do to play the game, but it is a game of kind of hot potato.

What model’s better? Should I go X.AI or Z.AI versus GROC versus Copilot versus Gemini, whatever. We’re just jumping around to different models to try to find the right one.

But again, it’s all still $6 Ubers. And maybe this week it’s $8 Ubers because the price is going up.

We’re seeing that intellect get weaker. And again, it’s gonna perpetuate slop creation. And someone who lacks the taste won’t know that it’s slop. They’re going to develop something that sucks, but they’re gonna say, it looks right.

I’m sure you’ve seen it. You’ve been on a website. This feels right, but something’s wrong about it. It’s like stepping into a house that a flipper flipped. It has marble countertops with a waterfall thing and nice cabinets. But something feels off about it. The laminate floor has a bubble in it. The drywall, you can see where they cut the receptacle out for the light switch has a little extra gap around it that they didn’t patch. It’s just kind of garbage around that.

I moved into a new construction a few years ago before this old house. And the air intake vent in some of the row homes wasn’t cut out. Someone put a grate on the wall, but behind the grate was just drywall. They never cut the vent hole.

It’s that kind of stuff, right? It looks good from the outside to do a run through. It looks good, but it’s off. It’s sloppy.

And it’s that slop can trick visitors into thinking, hey, this is legitimate. Oh, look, there’s a headline of brand promise, a clear call to action, yeah, it all makes sense. But it’s sloppy. There’s something that lacks taste and discernment. It’s a beautiful dish that doesn’t have salt on it. It’s not right. And if you have taste, you know it’s not right. But people who don’t have taste don’t know.

And that taste is getting nerfed out of the model. So we see companies run AI models to build and what they’re building becomes sloppy because they lack a leader that has taste, that sees how things are coming out and how they should be and kind of knows the difference.

A chef comes in and will put a spoon in the sauce and taste it and say, it needs more X. That’s what we’re looking for. Not for you to build the soup yourself or the sauce yourself. It’s the taste and discernment to come in with your experience and to make the changes that are required to get to the next level, to get it to that Michelin star quality.

That’s what you’re doing as a CMO.

There’s a meme that I sent over to the boardroom group and it said, sass is dead. Open Claw replaced all my subscriptions. I went from $480 a month on tools to $1245 a month on API costs and 15 hours a week fixing YAML files, adapter be left behind.

There’s a lot of this happening. And again, it’s not that AI isn’t capable. It’s the models that are being rolled out to us from AI are lowering their capability and they’re getting more expensive.

And this is a dual pressure you have to understand is happening. The model quality is going down and going up at the same time, right? It can do more complex things, but it’s lazier and it’s more likely to do sloppy things. And it’s a small stuff. It’s subtle.

I’m in a cloud code window and it says to me, who we pushed out a lot of projects today. Let’s take a break. Let’s a robots tell me to take a break. No, thank you. I’m not done yet. Keep going.

But it’s those little things kind of slow down development. They can push the person to do the wrong thing or develop the wrong thing or do the thing that requires less token utilization, which may be the incorrect thing to use.

So a leader is needed. A leader is needed.

You have to find a business where a leader is needed. And then you have to go be that leader. That’s the magic in being a fractional CMO.

Again, the magic is not being the person that says, hey, you guys want leads, I can bring you leads. I can find a lead person. I can find a lead person. I can find them on Upwork in, I don’t know, 10 minutes I can be on a phone call with a qualified media buyer overseas that’s inexpensive, that has spent, let’s say, a million dollars in the last 12 months on media and knows how to do stuff. And I can bring them in for cheap and they can do a good job. And you tie them in with AI, boom. We’ve got our lead problem solved.

But that doesn’t solve that there, in some companies, needs to be a person who’s responsible for the outcome. That’s what we’re after here. Who is responsible for the outcome?

You have to find the businesses that have outcomes that need a single person to be responsible.

Sometimes it looks like getting together on a quarterly basis and have a quarterly planning session and you have finance and your chief investment officer and you have your CEO and you have maybe a lawyer is present, where there’s more need for leadership, not just a marketing trick.

There are the email copywriters of today. God love them. I love copywriters. To me, they’re my favorite type of marketers. I feel they understand the game better than anybody else. They understand how marketing works.

These email copywriters now sell effectively how to get your emails to land in the inbox, which is a useful thing, but it is very transactional. Once the email’s in the inbox and then they’re sending emails and it’s okay. It’s an okay business model, but I don’t need the email copywriter I used to. And I don’t really need someone who’s, I’m paying top dollar for it. It’ll set my DKIM, DMARC, SPF record and maybe the BIMI record. I don’t need that stuff like I used to. I could just ask Claude to do it or something.

I need a leader. You need a business that needs a leader. That’s the functionality of the CMO is they step into a role where a leader is needed.

So these copywriters who are doing email marketing stuff and then doing DMARC record optimization, they don’t have the longevity that a CMO has. A media buyer doesn’t have the longevity that the CMO has. A designer doesn’t have the longevity. The CMO is the top role.

You have to go there, but you have to find the company that needs it.

And too many of you listening to this are gonna be like, okay, cool, Casey, thank you. So my next step is to go find someone who can barely afford me, who doesn’t need me, to prove to the market that I am then worth moving to the next level. And then after that one in three months or six months, move to the next level and the next level. And then finally, I’ll be able to charge $7,500 or $10,000 or $15,000 a month.

And my thought is like, you’re wrong and the delay is gonna hurt you more than anything else.

Move quickly to go find the clients who are in the need right now, position yourself in front of those who have leadership problems in marketing and then provide that marketing leadership.

Be that person who, listen, gets the frustrated call on a Friday. Hey, this didn’t work and I’m mad about it. Okay, cool, let’s have a human conversation because an AI won’t do that. An AI is not accountable. You’re accountable.

They’re frustrated because something happened. It’s happened to me today. A client was upset with something. Okay, cool, let’s hop on and talk about it. I was like, oh, I see the error, yeah. We can have it resolved in one minute. Great, cool, thanks. And it was a human interaction.

If it was an AI, your frustration has nowhere to go. There’s no one that’s responsible for it. There’s no story around it. Errors happen. What’s important is that you own them and that you’re quick to solve them if it’s possible.

So you need to be the human in the position to be the leader. That’s the thing.

Not everyone has what it takes to be a CMO. That’s another component of this. You’re not the type of person. You don’t have the experience. You don’t have the know-how. You don’t know how to lead people effectively. And we all have some blind spots.

If you’ve led teams before, if you’re a smart marketer and maybe you don’t know everything about media buying or maybe you don’t know everything about content writing or copywriting or structured SEO snippets, schema.org stuff, maybe you don’t know some of that stuff. That’s okay, that’s learnable.

But there is a tome of experience that you must have to be a CMO.

And if you think you have it and you wanna know if I think you have it, book a call with my team and we’ll tell you if we think you’ve got what it takes to be an end-to-man fractional CMO. And I’ll help guide you into the right place so that you’re aiming to serve clients that have real leadership problems so that you’re not in a transactional role as this CMO slash consultant slash marketing person. And instead you’re gonna fortified role where people respect you as the CMO and you can win business and serve it for a long time.

If you want that book in a call, cmox.co slash call, do it right now. Just know if you’ve got what it takes. And if you don’t, know what the next step is. Know what you have to do to get to that next level. We’ll tell you that on the call at cmox.co slash call.

All right, see ya, bye.

Thank you for sticking around for the full episode. As you know, learners are earners, but you’ve gotta take action on what you heard today. For more information and show notes, visit fractionalcmoshow.com. If you’d like me to answer your questions on an upcoming episode, you can share your question at fractionalcmoshow.com. And last, please hit the like and subscribe button so that I know that this content is helpful to you. All right, go get them.