MarTech 2025 with Cory Huff

Rohaan Kaul (00:01.311)
Hello everyone, this is Rohan here. Welcome to our video series, Martech 2025 presented by ZevOps. So today we will begin our series and I have on our guest panel today, Corey Hough, who's the Lifecycle Marketing Manager at Discogs. And I must say this is a very interesting and a very creative resume that I have come across. I mean,

Kory is a man of multiple talents. I've come across marketers, somebody who's come from a tech background, an engineer from sales to marketing. And I've come across people who've come from different aspects like HR and different domains to marketing. But this is really interesting because Kory was an actor and a director for 10 years. Is that correct? 10 years.

Cory Huff (00:56.554)
Yeah, I started acting when I was a little kid and my first professional stage experience was in high school. I was in a touring Shakespeare troupe in central Utah. And we performed all over the state and I performed in various theaters around Utah. Went to college, got my BFA in theater and acting there and performed on professional stages in a bunch of different places.

Rohaan Kaul (01:04.062)
Uh-huh.

Rohaan Kaul (01:09.214)
Mm-hmm.

Cory Huff (01:23.83)
and directed in a bunch of different places up until my mid-30s or so. And at that point, I had just sort of transitioned away from theater as a profession and transitioned into a full-time marketing career. And I still did and do plays, but now it's more of a hobby that I do. It just sort of naturally evolved over time, transitioning from one career to another.

Rohaan Kaul (01:54.175)
All right, interesting. how like, you know, whatever you kind of do, like, for example, I come from a sales background, sales and tech background, which is transitioned into marketing. And, know, that is quite evident in the kind of campaigns that I do and the way I do things, right? How has that impacted you? I mean, in terms of how you've been operating marketing, I noticed that you mentioned that, you know, the storytelling part of it using technology and data to do artistic storytelling.

So tell me something about it, that would be really interesting for our audience to know about, you know, artistic storytelling.

Cory Huff (02:31.288)
Sure. So everybody's data tells a story, right? And I think this is kind of common knowledge now, but back when I was starting my marketing career, I was working at tech startups where we had access to all of this massive amounts of data, right? We were doing open ID integrations with like Facebook Connect and Google's open ID solution. And we were in the early stages of connecting these enormous platforms to other companies, right?

Rohaan Kaul (02:35.261)
Right.

Cory Huff (03:00.32)
And so when I was working with, for example, like MTV networks, they've got 400 websites and you know, however many millions of people in their CRM and we are then grabbing those users, Facebook or Google login IDs, which come with enormous amounts of data. Each. So what is, what do do with those, big connections? How do we help our brands tell a story that is compelling to those users in this?

very large scale, very complex way and figuring out, of all of the web properties you might have or all of the products that you might have, which of those things are going to be most interesting and compelling to the end user. And then figuring out how you present that to the user in a way that makes sense to them. Right. Because it's one thing, like I think a lot of engineers would say, well, let's just show this product to this user and they'll make the connection themselves.

But what a lot of people don't understand is that you actually have to tell a story of why that thing is appearing in front of you. Right. And one of the things we're doing right now at Discogs, you know, we are like the niche brand that isn't a niche, that isn't niche. Like vinyl became popular again during the pandemic. And last year in, in 2023, there was more vinyl sold than any other year in history. So what we had to do was figure out, okay, we have all of these millions of users. How do we.

Rohaan Kaul (04:03.859)
Right.

Cory Huff (04:25.608)
show them some vinyl that might be relevant to them. So what we started doing was creating curated collections. Right. So we know that sad albums are really popular from our data. We know the sad albums are really popular. Lots of people love sad albums. They love being, you know, they the feeling that that creates inside of them. Right. So we have this series of collections, sad albums, albums that are 10 out of 10, no skips, happy albums.

and just other stuff like that, right? And then like the best of each genre. So what we started doing was sending people emails after they created a Discogs account. We know that, you know, from their activations that they have collected X, Y, or Z albums. So we use some of that data to say, okay, send this user a series of collections over time, maybe a few weeks or a few months to say, hey, here's the best sad albums. Or if you're new to collecting vinyl, you might want to check out the top albums in these genres, right?

And so we start to tell this story of a collector who is new to vinyl or maybe rediscovering vinyl after, know, maybe they're in their thirties or forties and their parents had a big vinyl collection. And so they're trying to figure out like, what should I add to my collection so that I can create the musical experiences that I want to have? So these are the kinds of stories that I've been working on for most of my career.

Rohaan Kaul (05:50.387)
That is very interesting. mean, you literally sound like the Don Draper of digital marketing right now. And I actually, I'm a huge fan of, I actually watched Mad Men purely for the sales pitches and I actually love them. Did you, did you like those? Yeah. So, huh. Right. And which was, which was your favorite sales pitch?

Cory Huff (06:10.075)
Mad Men? Yeah, Mad Men's like one of the greatest television shows of our time. It's, you know, it's a classic.

Rohaan Kaul (06:19.177)
of all for John Draper.

Cory Huff (06:22.51)
Mmm.

Hmm. I mean, it's really hard to top Don coming up with Coke, like I'd like to buy the world of Coke at the end, right? That wasn't actually his idea, but the, the way that he would stand in front of people and just get these visions. And it was all connected to like his childhood trauma and him being like, you know what? Like nobody cares about any of this stuff that we're talking about. Nobody cares about selling units of XYZ. What people care about is the way that.

Rohaan Kaul (06:32.102)
Right.

Rohaan Kaul (06:43.347)
Right?

Cory Huff (06:55.084)
this product made me feel, the way that this vacuum made my life easier so that then I can spend more time with my kids and my husband. Like these are the, those things weren't necessarily true, but they were stories that he was able to tell connected to his emotional experiences. Yeah.

Rohaan Kaul (07:00.989)
Right.

Rohaan Kaul (07:04.947)
Right.

Rohaan Kaul (07:13.567)
Right, yeah, I love that. I still tell people a lot that selling is more emotional than rational and that's where the engineers get it all wrong. Yeah, that's why I said I loved your resume when I looked at it. I was like, I mean, this is going to be something fun to talk about here. So tell me how

Cory Huff (07:20.906)
100%. Yeah.

Rohaan Kaul (07:33.427)
How is music tech industry? I mean, you know, typically I come across with a lot of people who work in the D2C space or the SaaS space where, maximum marketer. So music tech is sort of a little unconventional. I mean, not that, but how is this space and how do you see it operating any differences, anything that you find peculiar about this industry as compared to D2C or a SaaS brand or SaaS marketing?

Cory Huff (08:00.62)
Yeah, so I should say that I have jumped back and forth between B2C and B2B during my career. I started out doing agency work and then I was working at a MarTech startup that was a B2B MarTech company. We had music companies as clients, but we also sold to a bunch of different industries. And then I moved over to the consumer side about three years ago.

So it's been interesting to follow the evolution of the tech. In the early stages, there were some music specific tech startups that kind of either went away or got swallowed up by some of the bigger players. Right. There's a lot of consolidation in the music industry. There's four major music labels now. And those music labels tend to dominate when we talk about tech. Right.

The companies that are actually using things like CDP or large scale marketing automation, there's really just those four companies. Some of the music labels have started to do a great job of going direct to consumer and selling music that way, but you can't avoid working with the labels. And so when we talk about music tech, we have to talk about universal music and the others.

Rohaan Kaul (09:28.031)
And what do you think, I mean, in terms of, know, when you're talking about marketing a brand and as compared to, you know, helping these artists to marketing themselves, do you find any differences in how typically that the strategy or the tactics shape up for them?

Cory Huff (09:49.868)
differences compared to like selling software or something like that.

Rohaan Kaul (09:55.357)
That's true. mean, like typically, you know, when it comes to, you know, software specifically, we've got models where you have a freemium model and, you which is not the case typically that you will see with you know, with music, like, you know, it's so, and...

Cory Huff (10:05.613)
Right.

Cory Huff (10:12.226)
Yeah. Well, so I'll say this, like selling music is easier than selling like a CDP, right? A customer data plot. worked at, briefly worked at a customer data platform. That's why that example came to mind. And when we were there, like it was the hardest thing to actually say, this is what a CDP does. Right. And you'll, and everybody, you know, you see, and there are endless articles that are, what is a CDP and

What is a composable CDP and what it like, it just goes on and on and on and And everybody has just kind of made up their own definition of a CDP. and there's a few different ones, where music is a lot more immediately emotionally resonant and people know what they like. They know what music is, you know, the it's, easier to create an emotional connection and a reason for people to buy, which is just that, that thing that it makes me feel this way. Right.

the difference, like the challenge with music, of course, is there is so much music and there are literally, you know, thousands of artists that are publishing albums every year that we've never heard that, you know, most of us have never heard of. And I literally spend every day, I've come across some new artists that I've never heard of that we're promoting at Discogs.

And, you know, they have however many thousand like enthusiastic fans and I've never heard them. Right. So there's, there's so many niches. And one of the things that our marketing tools are not good at yet is figuring out automated ways to, reach audiences that are very wide and shallow. Right. We're really good at, marketing Taylor Swift because

There are a lot of people who buy Taylor Swift albums are really good at marketing the big artists, but it's really hard to market the large number of, you know, less popular artists.

Rohaan Kaul (12:22.845)
Yeah, I hear you. hear you. actually I resonate with that because I particularly have a fascination for listening to a lot of indie artists. And, know, even on the best of the platforms, I find it really difficult to, you know, find those indie artists, indie artists. Now, my number one go to sources actually now become Shazam that, you know, I keep on like if I go to a club or lounge or anywhere, I just switch on Shazam.

actually listen to music and try to find out what kind of you know these songs are playing because I found it really difficult to actually on major platforms. Now that since you brought this topic about tools now I think so 2025 I believe is going to be a different year or together because the rapid changes that are happening in the AI space right. So how do you see companies that are already existing

or the new startups that are going to come up, how do you see their MaTex stack building up in general? What would be the broad components of it and how do you think that will... The design of the tech stacks in the future is going to be impacted.

Cory Huff (13:41.622)
Yeah. So this is a really interesting time and I, you know, it's why you're putting this podcast together. The real answer is we don't know. It is, it is going to be chaos for the next couple of years. and, and I think there's two areas that are particularly interesting. one is predictive analytics. And the other is, like chat bots and AI agents that are trained on.

company's proprietary data. Right. So I can talk about both of those for a little bit, but I want to talk about the predictive analytics one first. So there is a massive gap between sort of the free analytics tools, right? The GA four and all of that. And then there's the, the giants of the analytics world, the Adobe, analytics and all that kind of stuff. And those big.

analytics packages cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to purchase and implement. And the free tools, the Google Analytics of the world, the G8, one GA4 is not great. I think we all know that. And two, especially if you're a company that's doing any kind of B2C volume.

tracking like purchase behavior and event behavior is really difficult with sampling rates and all that kind of stuff. and then the other problem area that I want to look at here that I think all analytics packages have these from enterprise down, is they are arcane. They're difficult to understand, right? There are whole, there's a whole legion of people who have dedicated their careers to running and building reports out of analytics packages.

because they are confusing. There's so much information there. And over the last year, I have attended a couple of conferences and a few different webinars where I have watched predictive analytics companies that are building tools that I think are going to leapfrog those analytics packages. And here's what I think is going to happen. Those companies, and there's a few examples that we can talk about, those companies are going to

Cory Huff (16:00.492)
connect to your data warehouse, right? And they're going to ingest all of your data. And then they're going to use LLM tools. They're going to use some custom prompts, like some advanced prompt engineering and some controls to prevent hallucinations. And they're going to give you insights into your data. And they are presenting these in an interface that essentially looks like a chat, right?

So an executive or somebody else who doesn't work in analytics can go in there and just type questions and say, you know, what was our average order value last week? And instead of having to build a complicated chart or have an analyst build a chart for you, you just ask the package what that, what that question, and then you can go from there. Right. and, you know, maybe the CEO goes, you know, give me five ideas on how we can increase our average order value.

Right. I, don't really know where that goes. Right. There's the, the, the tools can spit out those answers and then there's going to be a lot of work to validate that. Right. But it skips a whole bunch of analyst steps. Yeah. so I think that's super interesting.

Rohaan Kaul (17:13.437)
Right, that's true. All right. yeah, it's quite interesting. I'll go to the first point that you mentioned about that. It's gonna be chaotic, right? And you know, what happens when you have chaos is you need to pivot fast. you you require flexibility in those scenarios because, know, chaos means there is a certain level of ambiguity also, right?

Considering that, especially with startups, how do you think in this scenario, do companies or marketers would be able to balance that scalability, flexibility, as well as work in the budget constraints? Because I think so the other is that we looking at the funding. We had a funding winter funds like right now.

I've seen that the startups, the philosophy has changed from win at all costs or growth at all costs. It's become a little saner, I would say. They're talking more about profitability, making it sustainable. So in those scenarios, how do you see that, how do you get that flexibility, scalability, along with the budget constraints to work with? And at the same time,

ensure that your tech stack or your marketing is in line with the customer expectations as well as the trends that are there in the market right now.

Cory Huff (18:43.372)
Yeah, you're asking really hard questions. This is an enormously difficult question, right? So I've been working in startups for 15 years, and there have been periods where money was basically free, right? Where we could raise $30 million, and everybody was just kind of like, sure, you can have $30 million. And then we made a lot of, you know,

maybe not ideal decisions because the stakes were just like, if it doesn't work out, we can just go raise more money, right? Not that it was really that way, but that was kind of the, it certainly was not as focused as it is right now. So now money's harder to get and we have to figure out, okay, if I'm gonna do this, how do I stay profitable? I can't just throw a million dollars at customer acquisition. need to like.

create a story that's actually interesting and compelling to the people that I want to sell to. And the big disrupting things that are going to happen in 2025 is going to be the growth of the LLMs and the growth of AI agents. AI agents are going to explode in the next year. So all the marketers and the engineers are going to have to be super flexible around trying all kinds of different tools and really holding

the AI agent providers accountable for building a product that actually works and making sure that they build in enough capacity to try and to try stuff that is going to fail because when you try new things, stuff breaks and stuff doesn't work. if you try enough experiments, you will eventually find something that works. And the companies like these AI agent startups that are going to be building all these new tools

you know, nobody really knows what's going to work and what's going to fail. And so they're going to have to try to get to, you know, it's a race for customer adoption, right? I'm getting daily used right now with, demos demo proposals, like, Hey, can we do a call so I can show you our tool? I'm getting daily used with those right now, because every AI agent builder and you know, predictive analytics agent builder.

Cory Huff (21:00.492)
wants to try to acquire customers, right? And they're going to have to acquire them profitably. doing free trials and stuff like that might be harder. I don't know. So it's a race to get people. if the money isn't free, then you have to acquire those customers profitably.

Rohaan Kaul (21:26.227)
All right, so what are the three skills that you think in the coming 2025 with the advent of Gen.ai that marketers have to focus on, whether it is from a rescaling point of view of their teams or hiring new skills, what are those three top skills that you think are required in 2025?

Cory Huff (21:46.894)
Okay, so I started my career right before the 2008 financial crash and went into the job market, to the marketing world, right as social media was starting to come up, right? I think Twitter launched in 2007 or eight.

Rohaan Kaul (21:54.771)
Mm-hmm.

Cory Huff (22:06.4)
And so we were just coming out of like the blogging world and everything was open and it felt really new and felt really exciting. And I think we're in another one of those periods right now. And what benefited me was just following the things that caught my interest. And then playing with those tools and learning how to use them. And you don't have to become like that. think a lot of people think, I can't use gen AI.

because I'm not an expert, I'm not an engineer, but the reality is that there's very, very few of those people, right? And the people who lean into that and do it right now and start implementing those tools in their career right now are the people who are going to benefit from it when it really takes off, which is gonna be next year and the year after. So right now we are poised to...

favor the people who are leaning it. Now, there's some training you can do around prompt engineering and there's lots of companies out there that are offering prompt engineering, but it's really, I think the core skill set is the willingness to experiment and fail and the willingness, ability to do it quickly. Right. If you are somebody who is typically slow and typically methodical, you probably get great results, but you're going to have to be comfortable.

doing things that aren't perfect.

Rohaan Kaul (23:34.879)
Right, great. That's brilliant advice, I would say. I mean, nothing better than that. So before we sign off, I think we are coming to an end of a year. So any message for the marketing community out there, anything from Corey, heart to heart, that you would like to share with them?

Cory Huff (23:55.832)
I think the, one of the things that I am leaning into outside of my core marketing skillset is community building. we will do better if we learn from each other. And when I have conversations with the really experienced marketers right now, we're all like messaging each other back and forth being like, did you try the new chat GPT release? Because, wow. Right. And so we just like message back and forth with each other.

And I've started putting together some peer to peer calls with some other people who are in marketing ops and life cycle. Like let's just build community and not only online, but also locally. Right. I've been leaning into like coffee chats with other marketers here in San Diego, where I am, and just trying to make sure that as I'm connected to people, all of this wave of chaos that's coming around, as, new things come up, I can message a few people and be like,

Rohaan Kaul (24:29.665)
huh.

Cory Huff (24:52.812)
What are you doing about this? Because honestly, we're all kind of swimming and figuring it out right now.

Rohaan Kaul (25:01.095)
Alright, cool. If you do any coffee meetups in Portland, I looked at your resume, you have strong connections with Portland too. If you do that, I'll definitely come there because I love Portland. I mean, I am just in love with the... I actually had some of the most amazing food in Portland and I think so Nicholas is one of my favorite restaurants there.

Cory Huff (25:23.124)
nice. Yeah, Nicholas is great. I lived in Portland for 17 years and just moved away this summer. Yeah, so I'm actually going back right after Christmas for a few days to visit some friends. I love that city. Nicholas is a great restaurant. If anybody wants recommendations for places to eat while you're there, you know, I just moved away six months ago, so I still know all the good places, but that won't be true for very much longer.

Rohaan Kaul (25:27.477)
wow.

Rohaan Kaul (25:32.689)
Uh-huh. Yeah.

Rohaan Kaul (25:43.895)
All right, we will drop your LinkedIn, you know, profile link on our podcast. So anybody who needs recommendations on places to eat at in Portland, Corey is the right guy to head up for that. And in addition to that, he's got some amazing insights on arts, craft. mean, I mean, if I'm in Portland or San Diego, rather, I'll definitely meet up because

I mean, the arts and the music part is really a fascinating conversation for me to have. All right.

All right, Kauri, thank you. Thank you for your time. You were a great guest. mean, it was lovely and fun talking to you. mean, and I love this part about the community building. I mean, that's what that we are trying to do here at DevOps also to give it back to the marketing community, working with them. And it was great to have sign off this video series with you. I mean, somebody who believes in giving it back to the community. It was great to have you here.

I wish you and your family a very happy new year advancing towards 2025 and let's always that it would be a successful year for all us marketers.

Cory Huff (26:55.33)
Thank you so much Rohan and thanks for having me.

Rohaan Kaul (26:57.535)
All right, thank you.