In this Marketing Over Coffee:


Learn about possible new email standards, targeted CRM attacks, the ongoing saga of John’s running tech stack, and more!

<iframe loading="lazy" title="Embed Player" src="https://play.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/32207422/height/192/theme/modern/size/large/thumbnail/yes/custom-color/a15e0e/time-start/00:00:00 /playlist-height/200/direction/backward/download/yes/font-color/FFFFFF" height="192" width="100%" scrolling="no" allowfullscreen="" webkitallowfullscreen="true" mozallowfullscreen="true" oallowfullscreen="true" msallowfullscreen="true" style="border: none;"></iframe>

Direct Link to File

Brought to you by our sponsors: Wix Studio and NetSuite

Email Changes to be aware of – Expiring email? Unsubscribe prompt after 30 days

The future of GA4

7:22 – 8:13 Wix Studio is the web platform that gives agencies and enterprises the end-to-end efficiency to design, develop and deliver exactly the way they want to!

Dynamic Pricing vs. Surge Pricing

Targeted CRM attacks

12:27 – 13:55 NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, into ONE platform, and ONE source of truth.

Google pauses opioid painkiller policy update

Apple Watch Workout can’t handle audio cues?

Anne Lamott Bird by Bird

Gen AI Course Updates done: Special Discount on the newest Generative AI for Marketing Course! Hands on excercises to put AI to work for you! USE CODE MOC now!

Join John, Chris and Katie on threads, or on LinkedIn: Chris, John, and Katie

Sign up for the Marketing Over Coffee Newsletter to get early access!

Our theme song is Mellow G by Fonkmasters.

Machine-Generated Transcript

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.

John Wall – 00:00

Today’s episode is brought to you by Netsuite and Wix Studio.

Speaker 2 – 00:10

This is marketing over coffee with Christopher Penn and John Wall.

John Wall – 00:18

Good morning. Welcome to marketing over coffee. I’m John Wahl.

Christopher Penn – 00:21

I’m Christopher Penn.

John Wall – 00:22

Okay, we had a bunch of stuff this week. The interesting one was email changes to be aware of. Martech had an article talking about some things changing in the inbox. The lead one was the Apple inbox mail privacy protection program changing and things going on with that. But the interesting one for me was expiring email. Having email with expiration dates that will eventually leave your archives. I don’t know, what’s your thoughts on that stuff? Is expiring email feasible? That seems like just more headache than it’s worth to me.

Christopher Penn – 00:51

It’s interesting because it also presumes that the receiving mail server will comply with those instructions. I don’t know that it’s built into SMTP servers. If it is, it’s probably provider by provider. So perhaps the big ones like Gmail or Yahoo or Hotmail could and would, and it would make sense to do it because obviously if you have self-destructing emails, that will restore disk space at scale. But your Exchange server, your Postfix server, I have no idea if they would even support that or not. And if you are relying on the data deletion feature to clean up your mess, I don’t know that that’s something I wouldn’t necessarily want to rely on.

It also is interesting because when you get email, you kind of have the presumption that you have that email in terms of things like digital chain of evidence. Now that might be relevant if, for example, a vendor sends out an email and says, “Hey, this thing’s on sale”, and they get into a class action lawsuit later. The lawyer is like, “Well, we need the emails that prove that.” And if they are self-destructing emails, that may or may not be a helpful thing. So there’s a lot of — there’s technological hurdles and there’s legal hurdles to that.

John Wall – 02:02

Yeah. And I don’t know, it just seems to me that over time the technology is always to the point where it’s like — now we have — anybody could have the whole internet from the first five years on a flash drive lying around. I mean, there’s — enough storage is not an issue, especially with email. Seems to have done a good job in, limiting. Yeah, I don’t know, we’ll keep an eye on that. Another interesting one was unsubscribe prompt after 30 days. So if somebody’s doing a newsletter and they’re not publishing monthly, kind of automatically opting people out of that. I don’t know. That was another weird one to me. I didn’t see — I mean, I guess that makes sense in some ways, but it just seems like —

John Wall – 02:38

I don’t know. That just seems like way more possible headache than it’s worth.

Christopher Penn – 02:41

It does. And I have to question with a lot of these proposed changes and things, who benefits from all this stuff? Like, who would benefit from self-destructing emails and things? It almost, in some ways, it strikes me as the sort of thing that, say, a consortium of large technology companies who make their money on ads would be pushing to try to reduce the effectiveness of other channels to compel marketers to spend more money on their ads. Call me — call me a conspiracy theorist.

John Wall – 03:09

But I know that’s straight up tinfoil hat territory there. That could not happen with Google.

Christopher Penn – 03:16

Well, it’s funny you mentioned that, because this week I had a chat with some friends who work at a certain very large technology company that manufactures a product called Google Analytics four. And they were saying that there have been — and you’ve seen this in like Reddit forums and stuff like that — but my colleague was saying it’s true a lot of what you’re reading, that Google has essentially been decimated over the last 10 years by having a bunch of senior management who are all top tier consulting firm execs as opposed to technologists and engineers, and they have essentially gutted most of the company to the point where product teams and lines just don’t make sense anymore from a — what is Google good at? The example that they were talking about was Google Analytics used to be its own division.

It had its own building, it had its own team, its own P&L and stuff like that. And it was aligned with Google Ads, but it was an independent product. And then GA4, as part of this — this major change really was about aligning it more closely with Google Ads to have it be more helpful to Google Ads. Well, apparently in the last few years, outside the public eye, Google Analytics, the division, has been moved into Google Ads. And the people responsible for the product itself largely — now this is, from someone who is on the inside — largely are not there anymore. And so Google Analytics is being managed by Google Ads. The product development is entirely around data collection.

They said one of the things that is the highest priority right now is using AI to infer and backfill missing data from all the privacy protections that are taking place. They’re now using machine learning more and more to essentially guess what happened on your website because things like Apple’s browser is no longer showing up and blocking that data. And Google Analytics has really just turned into a data collection mechanism for Google with no benefit to the consumer. They were saying that the Google Analytics four team has absolutely no discussions about small business or midsize business. They are only focused on enterprise because 360 is still a product that’s for sale and they’re only focused on GA4 as it assists the ads business, nothing else. So any of the innovations that you are expecting to see are not there.

Christopher Penn – 05:42

And you can tell this — you and I can tell this as external folks — because Google, if you look at what happened to I/O this year, they showcased, “Hey, we’re putting Gemini in this. Gemini’s in Google Slides now. Gemini’s in Google Docs. Gemini is in Google search.” Gemini is not in Google Analytics, which is the one place where it would actually do some good.

John Wall – 06:01

Right. Right. Where it would help. Yeah, that tracks with everything we’ve seen because there was another article with one of the product managers of GA4 talki