Now with More Bionics and Context Bombing!

**SPEAKER_1** (0:07)
This is Marketing Over Coffee with Christopher Penn and John Wall.

**John Wall** (0:15)
Good morning, welcome to Marketing Over Coffee. I'm John Wall.

**Christopher Penn** (0:17)
And I'm Christopher Penn.

**John Wall** (0:19)
And we were just talking about, you know, literally on fire today, we're getting a break from 90 plus degree heat because it's so overcast from these Canadian fires that it's only in the seventies. But we've crossed over that point, like it's okay when we get these really spectacular sunsets, but now it's over into the, I feel like I'm smoking seven packs a day when I go outside. So, and what I saw was actually worse in the Boston area. Is it rough out by you guys?

**Christopher Penn** (0:44)
Yeah, so it, you know, I don't know if you've ever seen it, but there is the sky turns yellow before tornadoes. It was yesterday afternoon, like, oh, is there like a tornado warning or something? And they pull up all the apps. It's like, no, no, no tornado warning, just air quality warnings. The largest fire is up by Yellowknife in Northwest territories. That fire is bigger than the United Kingdom. That's how large this fire is. It is bigger than a country.
But there's three major fires now in Canada. There's one in the Northwest Territories. There's one in Saskatchewan or Manitoba that's directly north of Michigan. I can't remember.
And then there's one in Ontario. And the Ontario one is the one that's giving the East Coast a lot of the smoke, but it is really bad.

**John Wall** (1:30)
Oh, okay, so the Ontario one is that's... Yeah, I saw that swath coming from over Michigan, but all right, so it's the other one.
All right, well, just another... Everything's fine here on that front.

**Christopher Penn** (1:42)
One thing I do recommend is if folks still have them from the old days. So back in 2020, one of the things we had suggested on GearWatch was having a 20-inch box fan with a HEPA filter strapped to it. Originally, the idea was obviously it was highly effective on things like schools and stuff to filter out COVID and other viruses in the air, but it is also phenomenal for when the outside air quality is terrible. Put one of these things in your living room and just have it on at a low speed, and it will clean the air very, very well, and the filters are dirt cheap.

**John Wall** (2:12)
I'll see if I can dig up an Amazon Associates link for that, but otherwise go to Home Depot as we normally say. You had a whole piece this week on feature engineering that I wanted to talk about. What was going on there?

**Christopher Penn** (2:23)
So this is a piece that was talking about analytics with AI and how today's AI software, generative AI software, is so skillful at generating code. You can ask it for literally anything, but a lot of the data that we work with doesn't have enough data to draw really interesting conclusions. So the whole piece was on feature engineering of survey data in particular. I sent out my reader survey for my almost family newsletter.
And one of the things that is a truism in market research is, the more questions you ask, the fewer responses you get. People are like, I am not answering 38 questions. Like, no. So the goal was, how can I get as much data as possible from as few questions as possible? And I ended up with a survey is only six questions long. And one of the most interesting questions is, number two, what is your job title and company domain name? Because with AI tools, if I have your job title, I can engineer fields like junior staff, senior staff, junior manager, senior manager, something like that, I can interpolate that using AI and expand and create a new field.
If I have your company domain name, then I have your company name, and I can have AI fire up its own web search tools and say, okay, search for this domain.
What company is this? How big is that company? What are their annual employees? What's their annual revenue using DuckDuckGo or the search engine of your choice? And then write that back to the table. So I don't need you to tell me, this is our annual revenue, this is our number of employees, is all the questions that you were like, I don't want to fill these out because at least for what I'm doing, that's good enough. Like what I can get at a web search. If you just go to Google and say, how large is trustinsights.ai and stuff like that, it will give good estimates. And so with these tools now, you can say, here's the information I've got, and here's what I know from my own email marketing system. I have all the open gate data, I have the click rate data. I don't need to ask someone any of that. And all that's left in the survey is the questions I legitimately just cannot get data for, unless you tell me. And so the survey has gone very, very well because it's so short.