SaaStrophe Series: The AI Marketing Assistant That Wasn’t by Xan Mannekens, Fractional CMO
Description
🚀 Key Takeaways:
- The dangers of overhyping AI capabilities and releasing products too soon
- How poor internal communication can derail even the most exciting ideas
- The importance of realistic timelines, ethical marketing, and clear labeling systems
Join me for a firsthand account of how "Pulling an AudienceGenius" became martech shorthand for making bold promises without the tech to back it up. This is a cautionary tale about innovation gone wrong—and how to avoid turning your next idea into a marketing nightmare.
In this episode, I share the jaw-dropping story of how one eager marketer accidentally launched a campaign for a non-existent AI feature—and the chaos that followed. As a fractional CMO at a rising star in the martech SaaS space, we were excited to develop AudienceGenius, an AI concept meant to revolutionize content automation and consumer insights. But the excitement got ahead of reality when a draft announcement email hit our entire customer base, promoting a product that didn’t even exist.
What started as an internal brainstorm quickly snowballed into a PR crisis, forcing our team to build the feature from scratch in just four weeks. The result? A half-baked AI tool, lost customers, resource drains, and shattered morale.
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