Transcript

Bennie F Johnson 

Hello, and thank you for joining us for another special episode of AMA’s Marketing / And. I’m your host, AMA CEO, Bennie F. Johnson. In today’s episode, we explore life through a marketing lens, delving into conversations of individuals that flourish at the intersection of marketing and the unexpected. We’ll introduce you to visionaries whose stories you might not yet have heard of, but are exactly the ones you need to know.

Through our thought-provoking conversations, we’ll unravel the challenges, triumphs, and pivotal moments that have been shaped by marketing. Today, our special guest is none other than Nicole Alexander, author of Ethical AI and Marketing: Aligning Growth, Responsibility, and Customer Trusts.

Nicole is a leading voice at the intersection of marketing, technology, and AI ethics. With more than 25 years of experience driving innovation across global organizations, she’s led marketing and transformation initiatives at Metta and Ipsos. And today, she shapes future leaders as a faculty member at NYU and Columbia University, where she teaches graduate courses on AI, responsible innovation, and digital strategy. Nicole, welcome to the podcast.

Nicole Alexander

Hi, Bennie. Thank you so much for having me.

Bennie

It’s a pleasure to have you here. And I love that this can be a platform for your continued education and teaching and commitment to that. Because we’re talking about the future, and we’re talking about these moments of new technology and new spaces that require us as business leaders, as practitioners, as consumers to adopt new ways of learning. What advice do you often give practitioners about navigating this new world?

Nicole 

I think that there’s a lot of anxiety, specifically, especially when we think about careers, really thinking about what is the next step in someone’s role, especially when we look at AI. There’s a lot of anxiety around, am I going to be replaced by technology?

So I wrote a recent article about just how do you thrive sort of in this new AI enhanced marketing era. And I think, you know, it’s one of the questions that I love because it gets to the anxiety that a lot of us have. I think, you know, they see AI, you know, marketers in particular see AI generating copy. They see it creating images, analyzing data, automating campaigns and they really start to wonder what’s left for me, right. And I think the short answer is there’s a lot left. So, you know, but it requires sort of like an intentional focus on what are the skills AI can’t replicate. So, you know, I think about it in sort of a couple of different buckets. You know, first, there’s strategic judgment. Right. So like AI works on the level of like pattern recognition and optimization, right, within defined parameters. But someone has to set those parameters. Someone has to decide what to optimize for. They have to decide which trade-offs to make, when the data is wrong or incomplete. And that judgment, I think that requires sort of understanding context, culture, and competitive dynamics. An organizational reality.

Bennie

Right. Mm-hmm.

Nicole 

You know, humans who can translate sort of business problems into AI solvable problems are absolutely invaluable.

Bennie

So let’s, you know, it’s interesting to talk about, you said the magic word at the beginning, career journeys, right? And thinking about, you know, our role in our work more than the assignment, more than the kind of paycheck at that moment, but thinking about a career journey.

Nicole

Yes.

Bennie

What advice do you have, as you’re talking about navigating this moment, what advice do you have for my younger marketing leaders about thinking about career? We’re so focused on what’s our next job, what’s our next role, right? But we don’t really put a lot of fine emphasis on defining a career, building a career, thinking longer term in a career.

Nicole

Mm-hmm. Absolutely, and we should. I think it’s hard, especially when you’re younger, to think about the career, the long game. Because many of us are coming out of college, especially with debt. So you’re really thinking about, in that moment, how do I pay my rent? How do I feed myself? And how do I pay off my student loan? But one of the things I try and impart on my students, in particular, is thinking about what you enjoy doing, what you’re, and this is, this is not innovative or new, right? This is the advice I got early on. I’ve just rephrased this slightly. It’s what are you good at doing? Who will pay you to do it? And what do you enjoy? And, and that Venn diagram, that, that intersection is what you should be looking for as a long-term career. I think, you know, we all have areas that you know, things that we enjoy. And I like to tell my niece and nephews, if no one’s going to pay you for it, that’s called a hobby. And I want to encourage you to do said hobby, while also, you know, fulfilling a role that will be your career, which will be your job. And it doesn’t mean go for the big paycheck, but it means being able to live to be able to take care of yourself. And I think, you know, as we look at, you know, different roles…

Bennie 

Right, right.

Nicole 

A lot of students coming out of university or, you know, folks that are early career, it is difficult to think about the long term because as we see, especially in the tech sector or technology, things change so quickly, particularly now with AI, that sometimes as you’re thinking of that long term career, you also have to be brave enough and cognizant enough to also not be afraid of the pivot because, you know, I talk to folks all the time about, AI is displacing jobs. How can I plan my career? Like, that’s a great point. But when you think about jobs that we don’t even know exist yet, before Google, you never needed an SEO specialist because there was no SEO. There was no optimization. So before generative AI, you didn’t need a prompt specialist. But you may have been excited about writing about clarity of writing, about instructional guidance. That transitions, that skill set, that enjoyment transitions into prompt engineering. So I think it’s about really looking at what you enjoy doing and how that can translate across a myriad of different jobs, a myriad of different domains, but really thinking about what’s going to be important to you in five years, which is very different than 10 years and 15 years.

Bennie

So it gives me a great entree point to ask you about this professional happy place, where you found this nexus between the work that you do. Talk a bit about Nicole at the start.

Nicole 

Nicole at the start. Well, Nicole at the start was, I actually started, I’m gonna age myself. I hate to say this out loud. I started in Yellow Pages.

Bennie

It’s all right. Nicole, I’m right there with you. Which, by the way, they still do a billion dollars in business today. Just off of the print. Yes.

Nicole 

They do. And most people don’t realize that. Most people don’t. Thank you, Bennie. So yes, I…

Bennie

I’m here for you, my friend. Yes. Or I’m saying we’re similarly aged. Either way, a billion dollars of business. Yes, keep going.

Nicole 

Exactly. So I started early on as an account executive for a company called Hutchins DAC Group. They were a traditional Yellow Page advertising agency in upstate New York, Rochester, New York, home of Xerox, Kodak, et cetera. And I fortunately was able to secure a job by pitching them into the digital era, pitching them into yellowpages.com, moving from offline to online which I absolutely loved. And that kind of started this early foray into sort of the digital side, understanding technology, understanding, you know, the early internet up until the present. I think really, you know, what brings me enjoyment is the balancing or being able to straddle sort of these two worlds. I really enjoy kind of like that tension that I see as a practitioner in being able to work with amazing organizations. I started early on at Hutchins, then moved to digital marketing at The New York Times. I’ve led teams in Shanghai for Nielsen, Greater China. And it was always really interesting to me to sort of manage sort of the transformation of massive data sets, strategic insights, early AI and machine learning techniques.

And one of the things I think I saw recently in my most recent role with Meta is I had the ability to make such like transformative decisions, large scale decisions that really helped not just internal teams, but our customers in particular, small and medium businesses. But one of the things I saw with implementing automation, thinking about how, you know, we can better leverage advertising for customers, how they can get in front of their audience, was also sort of the tension, that moment of like where efficiency came at a cost of something important, which is things like consumer trust, transparency, even human agency at the end of the day. And that tension, and we were talking about this earlier, that tension led me back to Cambridge, to…

Bennie 

Right. Right.

Nicole 

Do a degree in AI ethics and society. Because I wanted to dissect not just how these systems work, but how they should work. And throughout all of that, I’ve been teaching. So one of the things I’m so excited about is the fact that I get to straddle sort of these two worlds. I would describe myself as someone who lives in the and space, marketing and technology, practitioner and academic innovation and responsibility, which I guess is actually not I’m thinking but it’s very apropos for this particular podcast.

Bennie 

Yeah, hey, there you go. You’re giving me my commercial right there, my friend. So, you know, it’s it is interesting about that tension and you’ve had a lot of experience managing global teams. And so when you think about kind of ethical frameworks, one of those tension points are cultural norms and global spaces in there. How do you find a kind of true north for a through line between what we can do and what we should do?

Nicole 

Yes.

Bennie 

Writ large globally.

Nicole 

Yeah, that’s a great question. And you don’t know what you don’t know, right? And I realized, before I moved to China, I already become a VP. I had my fancy executive MBA, thinking I kind of knew everything. And there is nothing more humbling, humbling than to go to another country and try and bring all of your experience into that cultural domain and completely fail at it at first. Because it gives you a moment to reset, hopefully to really think about what you bring to the table versus what actually is needed at that table and understanding that cultural nuance. I loved my time in China working with the team there and Neil said, because it really made me understand what situational leadership was. I’d always thought of myself as an empathetic leader, but situational leadership is what was needed. And being able to go and understand on the ground how things need to shift, how you need to help your team, customers, the client in different ways, in different settings.

I think it is really important for every marketer in particular, especially marketers that are global campaigns. They’re sitting in a corporate office or that oversee global versus regional marketing because that nuance is extremely important. Historically, we always talk about, this is the global campaign and now here, let’s just cascade this into the regions for local marketing. We’ve seen so many times that that just doesn’t work.

Bennie 

Right.

Nicole 

It doesn’t, it doesn’t, it feels inauthentic. I’ll say it.

Bennie

Right, right. And it’s one of those spaces where we miss the real insight and opportunity, right? Because it’s not the cookie cutter space out in there. The best campaigns tend to come from within. They come from multiple places. I love when brands are having filled what would be seen as a field market opportunity that comes a mass market that actually informs another field market.

Nicole 

Exactly. Exactly, exactly. And I’ve never seen, I have to say some of the best, the best advertising, the best marketing that I’ve seen in my lifetime has come from local markets. I love some of the most ironic, funny advertising comes out of Japan, comes out of places like Sweden, the Netherlands. I love some of the advertisements I’ve seen over the last maybe two years that have come out of like Ghana and Kenya in particular. And that nuance is something that you would never get from someone sitting in corporate out of London or New York or wherever.

Bennie

Right. Right. You know, and it gives that sense of, I love when you talk to beginning about the failures, right? Right. Cause I’m going to connect those two together in this conversation because when you fail in a different cultural context, you have no safety net. So you’re completely laid bare, right? It’s like, you know, you fail. Everybody around you knows you fail. It’s not a secret that you’re failing in this moment. And it’s not so much in the failure. I think it’s the opportunity of how we reassess, learn, reset.

Nicole 

Yeah. Exactly.

Bennie 

And push forward, right?

Nicole 

Absolutely. I couldn’t have said it better myself because and I think that’s the differentiation that allows you true leadership, right? Because if you can’t reassess and evaluate your own behavior and pivot accordingly, then how can you do that in a leadership perspective of a team of 150, you know, plus folks on your team? So you really need to understand and humble yourself to understand what’s needed on the ground in this moment from this team in this environment. And thankfully, I did that. And I was able to end up finally being successful in the role, but also learning a lot that I eventually obviously took on to other roles, as well as just even in general bringing into my classroom. I teach students that have come from all over the world and it allowed me to really think about ensuring that I’m not teaching from a very homogeneous perspective. And I’m really thinking about nuance, not just of cultural differences, but accessibility issues, things of, am I really listening to the student versus just teaching from the syllabi?

Bennie

Right which I think is incredibly important as we think about modern pedagogy, right? What our students are looking for to have an adaptable, very real space in which the lessons, they can see a direct connection to the work at hand.

Nicole 

Thank you.

Bennie

Right? How do we get in this space? So we talked a bit about tension. I’m going to push on that a bit more because ethical frameworks are at the heart of the work that you do. How have you navigated those tensions between you’re going across multiple markets and multiple stakeholders? And one set of ethical framework says, let’s do it and let’s do it faster. The other says, let’s approach it with caution. How do you mitigate that in today’s world?

Nicole 

Yeah, and I mean, you that’s, it’s an excellent point. That’s one of the things I tackled when I was writing my book, right? Because there are different elements of ethics, right? There’s the ontology, you know, there’s the, most folks think of it in does the end justify the means? Or is it about the journey that we take no matter the outcome? Or is it about this virtue?

Bennie

Right.

Nicole

Altruistic component, as long as we’re a virtuous person, then whatever we do has a virtuous outcome. And that’s very philosophical. Right. So I always wanted to understand how does that obviously then translate into practice because people need to, I mean, philosophy is great, but people need to actually be able to implement this on Monday when they get to work. So, I mean, one of the things that I tried was to stop thinking of ethics or I try and talk to divisions and marketing teams about is stop thinking of ethics, right? As like this compliance checkbox, right? That you do kind of after the strategy is set and start thinking about it more as the strategy itself. So, you know, a business case is actually, you know, the business case itself, I think is quite clear now for practitioners. Like we have data showing that consumer trust directly correlates with purchase intent, with loyalty, with willingness to share data, right? And trust erodes when, you know, very quickly, when people feel manipulated by an algorithm or they don’t understand, you know, why they received a different price than someone else in their household or a friend, you know, across town. So, you know, one of the things I really wanted to do in my book was I introduced the PACT framework to kind of make this more actionable. So, impact just very quickly. just talks about personalization, right? That respects boundaries. And that’s a lot of the nuance of how do you personalize but not get into that domain that just becomes creepy, right? Thinking about the accountability, right? Accountability for how algorithms make decisions. And not accountability from just who to blame, right? Who do we point the finger at? But really about accountability when

Bennie 

Right. Right.

Nicole 

Who has the decision power to change something that we know is broken and change it quickly? And is there any recourse for a consumer or someone that was impacted? I also talk about the contextual sensitivity. And this comes a bit more on that global nuance, right? So really thinking about cultural, contextual sensitivity across cultures, as well as across different situations. And then finally, trust. Which is both an output as well as a pillar in and of itself. Trust is the measurable outcome that you’re optimizing for. So regardless of which ethical perspective you want to adopt within your organization, I champion that there really should be sort of, if you look at all ethics, there should be kind of a mix.

Bennie

Right. Right. Right.

Nicole 

Right. Because different situations call for sort of different balance of how you execute in a product or programmatically through advertising or design, et cetera. But I do think that there’s, there’s a myriad of frameworks that are easily adaptable, like tomorrow for marketing teams that want to start implementing, you know, responsible and ethical AI within their marketing teams. And then thinking about just the steps of kind of like, you know, beginner, right? This is what you can do on Monday. This is your three to six month plan out of like how you can do this in more depth. And then this is your enterprise wise strategy about really thinking about how do I roll this out? Not just globally, but particularly in regions asking the right questions for the folks on the ground in those particular cultural moments, know, regions, cities, et cetera.

Bennie

Right. Right. Right. Yeah, I think that’s a great way of thinking about it and realizing this is a continuous work in progress. So you’re setting the intent. One of the things that we see in trust is it’s not just the actions. It’s consumers understanding the intent, the delivery, the consistency of the first. And that’s where we break the trust. We’ve got a really lofty goal that we announce.

Nicole

Yes. Yes.

Bennie

In the top of our marketing lungs that we don’t have the operational systems or corporate intent to do. I wouldn’t be upset if you didn’t give me the world, but you told me you were going to give me the world.

Nicole 

Precisely. Exactly. Exactly. You set my expectations here and you feel to deliver.

Bennie 

Which is the breakpoint of trust, right? The belief that I can do it and then the ability to be able to have it done. If there’s a disconnect between that, you know, we’re sitting as brand leaders, as marketing leaders, as leaders in general, we’re sitting on the sideline trying to figure out how to repair this broken trust.

Nicole 

Exactly. I think, you know, personalization is like that one area in our marketing toolkit that we love. We absolutely love, right? We loved in the early days of the internet with segmentations and, you know, attribution and like fast forward to now with AI and advanced techniques. We want to personalize everything because we want our customers to know that we’re talking to them. But we have to understand that personalization without context is just is is creepy at the end of the day

Bennie

Right. I was going to ask you, where is the creepy line today? Because it’s one of those things that as marketers, we have to understand that our consumer practices and consumer taste change as well, right? So what was creepy 10 years ago is a little different than expectations today or tomorrow. But I’d love to know, as we brought it up a couple of times, technical term, what’s the creepy line today?

Nicole 

Yeah. I love this question and I’m so glad that you also hit on the fact that what was creepy yesterday may not be what’s creepy today because you know, I’m sure we’ve all seen some ads from back in the day. We’re like, this is this is beyond creepy, right? Like this did not age well, right? And we don’t want to be those people. So but I do think, you know, as I think about I think about this as when I think about that creepy line, I think, you know, it moves based on context based on relationship and whether the consumer feels they got something valuable in exchange for, let’s say, their data, right? Just as one example. You know, here’s my sort of framework for like staying on the right side of history. So, you know, first, I think it’s about transparency as a default, right? So you don’t like that I’m going to just use data. So many different examples about I’ll use data in particular. You know, you don’t bury your data practices in like privacy policy that nobody reads and market. We know no one reads the TNCs, right? So you tell people right in plain language, like what you’re collecting and what they get for it. And the brands doing this well treated as sort of, you know, part of their value proposition, right? Not as some like at legal disclosure, right? That no one understands in just regular language. I think secondly is to you earn the right to personalize. So there is a big difference between personalizing for a customer who’s been with you for like five years versus someone who’s visited your site once and matching the depth of the personalization to the depth of the relationship is what’s very important. So you don’t act like you know someone that you’ve just met, right? Just in real life. And the same is true online. So the level of personalization has to be contextualized.

Bennie

It’s so true. I’m going to extend our metaphor in a creepy line. It’s like if your best friend knows what you typically order at the restaurant, it’s very different than the peering stranger monitoring what you eat, right? It’s the same action, the same knowledge, but the contextual relationship is so very different.

Nicole 

I love that analogy. You go to a restaurant for the first time and if your waiter knows what dish you like, that is disturbing to say the least. And you’re starting to look around like, I being punked? So it’s this context that you really have to, as marketers, this is our job. This is what we’re charged with. We are charged with not just building, but to I mean starting and you know that early relationship but keeping that relationship over time. I also think the third one was is really about you know giving people control and I think this is such an easy area that so many brands miss the mark on. It’s you know and I think it’s because you know companies as organizations we want to keep control but you know and not fake control right with that you know 50 toggles nobody actually understands but you know meaningful choice. So, you know, can they see what data you have about them? Can they adjust? the intensity I’ll use that word of the personalization and can they delete data if they want to You know can I think? Controls build trust even when people don’t exercise it But just having it available and this could be in a dashboard format. This could be how however the organization sees fit.

But having it as an option means that you’re providing the customer with their own agency to be able to stipulate and make changes. And the irony, the irony is when you do this, you actually get better marketing efforts, reduced waste, because if you think about someone, maybe they’re in a different stage of their life, maybe, you know, I use this with a client, if from a pet side.

Bennie 

Right.

Nicole 

Purina, this is just an example. Purina may not know if your beloved dog passed away. So to continue to send somebody coupons and discounts or, it’s Fluffy’s birthday. That is a horrible reflection on your brand. You want that two-way dialogue so that they can tell you that something happened or we no longer want to receive information, whatever the case is.

Bennie 

Right. Right. Right. Right.

Nicole

And that allows you as a marketer a better experience to give that customer or other customers.

Bennie 

Right, you said it doesn’t, it gives you the space to know but not assume, right? Because you have a set of facts and actions and data points, but you don’t have knowledge, right?

Nicole 

Exact. Precisely precisely and I’d say the biggest mistake is optimizing personalization for these short-term conversions, at the expense of long-term trust so that we targeting ads that follows someone across the internet for three weeks trying to sell them boots, right? It might be you know, it might get you the click but it damages the relationship. So I really think more marketers need to think about, you know, you know lifetime value not just the immediate transaction in front of them.

Bennie

That’s a really great space in there. You just, you I said this before, you’re filled with all these insights. So what prompted you to write the book? When did it hit that Nicole actually has some thoughts on this and you’ve got some battle scars and some strategies and some points of view that you’d like to share with the rest of us. When did you make that transition from marketing executive, research leader to author?

Nicole

Mm-hmm. So I’ve wanted, I’ve wanted to write the book in my mind. I’ve wanted to do this probably since, probably around the time right before the pandemic kicked in. And then the pandemic came and I hibernated. I was laid off which was a wonderful thing. I got to go back to my enclave down in Mexico City and just enjoy sort of not having to do anything for anyone else. And I started writing. And obviously with, I’m sure a lot of authors or folks who are thinking about what to write, the book evolved over time. I originally was in academic work. Right, which is for anybody who has had to, you know, read heavy. It was like 500 pages of just a lot of information that practitioners could not. It did. It did. I have to say it, there was still some trauma from it. And then I realized, you know, I went back to the why, why am I doing this? And it’s because I wanted to write the book that I wish I had had as sort of a manual or like guidance in my roles to really talk about this is what you should do tomorrow to make sure that you’re doing the best for society, for your customers, but also, you know, even as a cautionary tale so that you’re not that company or that executive on the front page of the New York Times because you did X, Y, and Z. Right. So I wanted something that was, was practical and guidance.

Bennie 

Right.

Nicole

So I kind of switched the way I was writing and who I was writing for. So I decided to write for the marketing manager, the creative manager, the folks that handle content across domains. And I honestly really enjoyed writing the book. I got to interview a bunch of different friends, colleagues. There’s use cases in the book from Ipsos from the CMO over at Ipsos, from a myriad of Chris Duffy from Adobe and some of the great work that they’re doing over there around provenance, tracking and just making sure people understand that this generative AI is generative AI. So that was absolutely amazing. And fortunately, Kogan Page reached out to me and asked if I’d ever thought of doing a book. I said, I said, let me just send you my Dropbox. I said, I have it all here. So that worked out very well. I mostly had to cut it down because it was still a little bit too.

Bennie

Isn’t that that wonderful moment where all these paths and journeys and this universe comes back in there? No one would have connected the dots from China to Harlem to Mexico City to the pages on your Dropbox.

Nicole 

Exactly. It’s so true. It all came together just so smoothly, to be honest with you. And it’s been nothing but a joy, honestly, talking about the work, getting to especially speak with students, as well as active practitioners over the last couple months since the book dropped.

Bennie 

Right. So I’m going to ask you this advice question in two parts. So if you had the big idea advice to share, what would that be for practitioners who are emerging who want to make a difference? That’s one. And number two, the same question if you were to deliver it as a cheat code to help people move up quicker. So what’s the big lofty idea? Giving you your academic expression. And then what’s the cheat code to help our folks deliver next now?

Nicole 

So the big idea and this, it may not be as grandiose as it should be, but I think the big idea is something that is easily digestible, folks don’t always lean in to do it for a myriad of reasons. My big idea is, you know, don’t wait for permission to be ethical. You know, at a high level, you don’t need your company to have like a formal AI ethics policy, to start simply making better decisions in your next campaign, in your next meeting. Ask things like, what could go wrong here? Who might be harmed? Is this something we’d be comfortable explaining to a customer? Those questions cost absolutely nothing, but they change everything.

Bennie

Right. Mm. Yes, it’s so true. I remember my general counsel when I was at the Council of Better Business Bureau used to always talk about the legal line is the bare minimum. It’s not the higher standard. And so because he would often get brought in and the question like, is it legal or not? Right? That’s not if we’re starting off there. We’ve already lost. We’ve lost trust. We’ve lost our way. We’ve lost our mission.

Nicole

Exactly. Mm-hmm.

Bennie 

And I love that it doesn’t cost you anything to ask a better question, to search for a better outcome.

Nicole

Exactly. We’ve all seen those campaigns where we sent messages. Who was in the room? Like did no one?

Bennie

Nope. Was everybody on vacation? Did the spam filter pick up? Yeah, yeah. But then there’s those moments that we pause and go, OK, we assume that somebody was not in the room. The fear is everybody was in the room, right?

Nicole 

That’s the fear. Everyone was in the room and no one asked the questions. No one spoke up. No one just simply said, why?

Bennie 

What? Why? You know, so, so true in this space in there. So, so now what’s the cheat code? I’m in, I’m in the game.

Nicole 

Yeah. So. So you’re in the game, you know, I think about, you know, going back to the earlier question that you asked around sort of careers and jobs, you know, I would say, especially the leaders, right? I’m going to speak to leaders in particular, because I don’t think that leaders really understand the magnitudes of the of what what they can do.

First and foremost, you know, investing your human edge, right? That’s, that’s my cheat code for leadership. Whatever AI can’t do today, it’ll probably be able to do arguably next year, right? Or the year after. So my, my cheat code to leadership is don’t anchor your value to specific tasks. Anchor it to things like judgment, to relationships, to creativity, to ethics, the things that require being human at the end of the day, right? Those will only become more valuable as AI handles more of the routine. And that’s where your strategic value in your teams, in your organization, that’s where you need to lean in on.

Bennie

Right. I think that’s a great point because sometimes we conflate technical complexity with true complexity. So these things that are technical that can be very routine, we’re seeing that now in the marketplace. I can come in and parse a ton of data and a ton of code and I don’t need that expertise in that way anymore.

Nicole

Precisely.

Nicole 

Right. But then you’re like, so what, what next? Right. And that’s where the human comes into play. Now that I’ve parsed all this data, now that I’ve done all this fancy stuff behind the scenes, how do I make sure that the outputs of this is palpable is relatable, becomes a story resonates the same way as it has the potential to do in the U S in Japan, in India, and in Brazil.

Bennie

Right. So with an eye towards your experience being in the classroom dealing with the future, but also working in global markets in the future, what gets you excited?

Nicole 

I get really excited when I’m able to see that sort of moment or those that that evolution when students get it. And when I say get it, I mean, when they really see the value of what they get to offer. Right, going into do interviews, have these critical conversations and become practitioners, what they’re taking out of the classroom and how they’re using technology, but how they’re putting their own unique voice and perspective and cultural nuance and all of this that they’ve, you know, achieved over the course of their life, how they’re pairing the two together. And I absolutely love, you know, a lot of times

You know, students at the end of my course are probably all this is so difficult. I can’t believe how hard this, but I love having students come back to me a year later, two, three, five years later and saying, you know, I use this in an interview and, I never thought I would, or I needed to do this as part of a reorg or I needed to, you know, implement this in my organization. And I was like one of the only people that had context on some of the questions that we should ask as we’re implementing something. And it’s just an amazing feeling. So I really love the fact that, or I get excited about the fact that, you know, education is still so important. And I would argue it’s even more important and not necessarily formal education. You don’t have to go to a, you know, a major university, but I think that what gets me excited is people really reflecting on what they are able to do in their career, in the organization, how they make the impact they want to make, and how consistent learning helps to allow them to achieve that.

Bennie 

My friend, I can’t think of better words to end our conversation with living in the space of and and technology and marketing and opportunity and seeing that we’re excited about a future that rewards everything that makes us human. The ups, the downs, the successes, the failures, the failures, the successes and all the work that we do in between. I encourage everyone to explore their own ways of learning, as we said before and check out Ethical AI, pick up the book anywhere. If I’m to reach out to our friend Nicole here who’s teaching, sneak into her class. But also I encourage you to check out the AMA and our research and learning that we have to help you get not only the big ideas, but also accelerate with the cheat codes. So Nicole, thank you so much for being here and thank you all for this episode of AMA’s Marketing / And.