AMPLIFYING INNOVATION – Unleashing AI's Power in Marketing and Content Creation

Speaker 1: 0:00

I am so glad that you said that, Kurt. I'm so tired of talking about.

Speaker 2: 0:07

We're all carrying around a lie. We've been just carrying around a lie all these years.

Speaker 1: 0:12

Welcome to the Marketer. In this episode, we focus on AI and its impact on marketing. We're joined by experts Seth Wilson, Jillian Childs and Kurt Thompson to explore how AI is transforming our industry. Check out my guest contact information and bios in the summary below, and be sure to follow this channel for more marketing insights. Let's get started. So thank you guys for joining me today.

Speaker 1: 0:38

Really appreciate all the expertise and things that you're going to share with us. Today. I'm just going to go ahead and jump into some questions for you guys, because I want this to just be rock solid information that people can jump through all the way through it. Okay, so my first question that I have for you is how is AI currently reshaping the marketing landscape? You're in. You guys are all in your individual fields with companies and many companies that you've worked with in the past. Ai has sprung up on us like overnight. Can you share with me your perspective on how this is kind of reshaping your own jobs and the companies that you're working with? And, seth, I'd like to start with you, certainly.

Speaker 2: 1:32

I'm a one-man band marketing department currently. I tend to work for startups and I'm used to being the first marketing guy on the ground and that typically involves at this point of hiring a couple people. I would typically have a graphic designer, I'd definitely have a copywriter by now, and it's really kind of delayed. The need for that I haven't really for the exceptions of just some like kind of really detailed print layout work, when once in a while I'll go grab a designer or something, I'm able to create really impactful graphics and a whole bunch of content pretty much by myself.

Speaker 2: 2:15

And for the most part I'm finding those that relationship, that working relationship, to be a lot better, because I tend to get the idea that I want produced from kind of soup to nuts, instead of having to go through 10 people with their own ideas getting thrown in there.

Speaker 1: 2:32

Fantastic. Is there a specific tool that you've been using for your graphics? Has it just been Dolly, or have you found something else that has been helping you?

Speaker 2: 2:44

Yeah, it's funny, it's definitely been a horse race in terms of generative AI tools, especially in the imagery department. Really got started with mid-journey, got some really cool results out of that. Then Dolly 3 came along. You pair that with ChatTBT4. You get some really great, very accurate results. But now mid-journey version 6 came out right around Christmas I think it was like the 23rd or something like that and now it's handling things like text almost as well as Dolly is, but with that incredible vibrant kind of mid-jerk to go along with it. I've actually went ahead and bought a year of their professional, really expensive package because I know I'm going to use all those credits in the next year for sure.

Speaker 1: 3:27

Yeah, and it does go by the credit system. Is that effective? When you're kind of using that, you feel like it could be better.

Speaker 2: 3:39

Yeah, I think the big difference when you actually pay a decent amount for a mid-journey, for example. Your lower packages you're free, you can do one job at a time. Your lower packages you can do about three jobs at a time. The professional you can do 12 at a time.

Speaker 2: 3:54

And I've actually found that to be a much better working space. I'm never really waiting on it. I can't normally think of 12 prompts in the time that it takes them to be produced, so that allows me to not only go through a whole lot more variations, but copy paste, enter, copy paste, enter three or four times. So instead of four variations I got 12, 16, 20 variations. So I can just do a little bit more of that curation.

Speaker 1: 4:20

I've been. I don't know about you, Jillian and Kirk, but I really have not dug in too much into the graphic side of things. I'm a graphic designer myself, so I remember my first job coming out of college. I went to work for this college and it was basically the first version of Adobe InDesign that they had that they were using. I don't even know if anybody uses InDesign anymore.

Speaker 1: 5:01

But, yeah, the lady that I replaced, who had moved on to another job, she was not using it at all and everything was pasted up, right. I mean, it was this old school, super old school stuff and it took forever. And I came in there and I was fresh out of college, I'd been using some of these tools. I'd never used InDesign and I decided, well, I'm going to pick this up, I'm going to see if I can just do it, and had a book that you actually had to read for, you know, to learn it. I learned it, I started using it and now everything was suddenly faster.

Speaker 1: 5:40

What I noticed over the next few years of my career is that really anybody could use InDesign. You didn't have to be a designer, right, and a lot of people were companies were having their secretaries and different admins and stuff use both InDesign, even Illustrator and Photoshop. You know to create flyers and stuff like that. And so you know, the talk back then was is Photoshop and Illustrator and all these tools going to replace the graphic designer? And we're now kind of cycled back into that whole mode again of will designers become obsolete? Is the creative you know, going to be obsolete from that? So, kurt, jillian, can you share your thoughts about your experience with it and where we're going today?

Speaker 3: 6:36

So I have to say I'll jump in. I have to say your example of Photoshop, indesign, everything else it puts the real bullseye on the fact that it doesn't matter how accelerated or what new piece each technology gives, it still matters the importance of the idea and the importance of being a creative critical thinker and coming up with the right question. Now, in today's parlance, that becomes what's the prompt? Okay, and framing prompts has become a skill set all by itself, because it matters so much in output. And I say all those things because it relates to how to creatively use all these AI tools in a way that furthers and speeds and accelerates and jump starts and all those other words that are about leaping forward faster. And that's To me, seth, your examples are perfect. You know the whole. I'm the first marketing person on the ground.

Speaker 3: 7:42

Comment really speaks to me because, in essence, if you play it right, all of the AI tools become your first marketing person on the ground, because they can create information, they can create graphics, they can anticipate. You know best practices. Those questions become really the currency of all of this. And as smart as people are about using the tools, or as skilled as I should say using the tools. It still matters in all the practices I've worked with it so far. It matters much more about how critical and thoughtful you are still about the prompt, the question, the added pieces to those questions, not just the straightforward question but you know. Or prompt, but the. You know for a five-year-old to understand, or you know for somebody who doesn't speak technical language, or you know all the other sorts of characteristics that help you get to really intelligent use of the tools. Pardon the pun.

Speaker 1: 8:40

No, I totally agree with you and Jillian, what's your thoughts?

Speaker 4: 8:44

Yeah, so I totally, I totally understand where both of you were coming from. I totally agree with that as well. I have been. Right now I'm a woman show, so I'm trying to figure out additionally how to use some of these additional AI tools and scale efficiently. And so right now in my role, I'm handling kind of marketing across four different business units.

Speaker 4: 9:09

So understanding all of the global nuances that come both from a regional level and a global level and then the product details under that is something that I'm, you know, constantly trying to keep up to date with writing content, figuring out how we target our personas to ABM sort of advertising. But on the subsequent side, while these tools have been really, really efficient and scalable for me and helping scale content, I still need human eyes on some of this stuff. So, you know, from a technical perspective, we get really in depth with our products. I work with a lot of engineers and have across multiple organizations that I've been a part of, and so something like a data sheet you know I can't necessarily sit there and put it into an AI tool and it map out what the product specs are going to look like and how we're gonna present that, say, at a trade show. So they're scalable, they're efficient and they're a lot of fun to use and see what's going to work.

Speaker 4: 10:09

I think you know I need to play around more with the images for ads. We had a graphic designer before and now we don't, so there's a lot of things in the future that I see working in my favor. There's a company called Tofu that is a startup company as well, and essentially they scale all of the content. So if you have an anchor content, you can put it in there. It'll split out blog articles, emails, you name it. It has a list of all of the pieces of content that you can create from that anchored piece of content. So I will be using that tool more efficiently, putting blogs up and helping with all of the writing and the content creation when I find myself not having, you know, the resources available in my day to day.

Speaker 3: 10:57

That's bonus time for me, I gotta say, julie, and just the whole idea at the end of taking you know what we all do, right, we all create a anchor piece of content, an anchor thesis statement, right, and to speak sort of in academic terms, and you have to turn it into a thousand other things and to be able to do that, I think, is really really kind of added magic, right.

Speaker 3: 11:22

It's terrific. I feel like one of the things you touched on in your comment there really speaks to the businesses that I work with, which is humanizing that content. And you know I work my background's a lot of consumer and very consumer facing businesses, but I work in a lot of B2B spaces and a lot of professional services spaces, because it's all, at the end of the day, about customer engagement, customer content and engaging customers in the right ways. And the most important thing that the AI tools help me work with is humanizing what otherwise is going to sound very spec sheet driven kinds of content, information and to remind ourselves that people buy. It doesn't matter what it is, people buy and they buy for a variety of drivers and appeals and you gotta just humanize that into it with, of course, using the appropriate technical language, but you're just reminding me very strongly that the tools can help you so much get to core balancing both the humanizing and the emotional sorts of sides of it, as well as the objective specifics, engineering, tech, whatever it is, to bring that to bear.

Speaker 2: 12:38

I think there is a, you know, a component that goes beyond, you know, again, just the efficiency, right, the I got an extra set of hands here. There is also the ability to see an idea produced, and I used to work, I came up through an ad agency and so, and you know, I was a, you know, high up there, so I could, you know, go grab a couple of graphics designers and say, make me this, and a week later, and a couple thousand dollars worth of labor, we got a thing. And then there's probably gonna be a couple more thousand dollars getting a test, right, right, and so it makes a lot of things like just not practical to even try. When that try becomes a few minutes, it does allow you to get even more high-minded. It's not just I got bots doing things for me and splitting stuff up, it's really allowed me to, you know, think outside of what my typical thing would be.

Speaker 2: 13:29

You know what would my typical way of promoting this webinar be?

Speaker 2: 13:32

Okay, we'll get a blurry background, a couple round headshots of people and some logos and a date and time in there, right, and well, that's all I could really practically produce, you know, in a budget that made sense.

Speaker 2: 13:46

Now you can make these things that are really visually engaging, that talk to the subject matter of the thing and do it 10 different ways and maybe that's gonna be an afternoon of your time and so really, you know, I made a birthday card for my sister in Loxie just last night and I was showing through the rejects of the birthday card and there was a couple that people kind of like 20 years ago. That would be like hanging on the wall of MoMA, you know like that would be. That would be a perfectly suitable piece of art. You know it's kind of had a bizarre nature to it to a certain degree, but just how much you throw away that would cost you tens of thousands of dollars. Otherwise, in the pursuit of finding the variation and the slight little turn that you want to take, has been really helpful and kind of downright inspiring for me over the past couple of months.

Speaker 4: 14:37

Yeah, to that point, you know, I think it's. I think AI tools can be the starting point for an idea. If you don't know how to do something, you can ask it and it'll spit it out. Hey, where can I even start with this? What sort of logic flow do I need to take? And I think that's been incredibly helpful instead of, you know, trying to find a book off the shelf or, you know, read a book over the course of a month to get ideas and help with positioning or anything else that you're working on.

Speaker 4: 15:06

And I think you know I've worked in startups for at least the last decade and we've been in always in that high growth area and my budgets have been incredibly small. So you know, the scrappy terminology has been part of all of the culture that I've been part of for a long time. And when budgets are small, you need the tools to help you scale and resource, especially on the marketing side, because marketing notoriously kind of the first to get budgets cut, unfortunately. But you know, I think AI has helped with understanding what resources you have available, working within a really set parameter of budgets and seeing what you can actually produce and getting excited by that production because, frankly, you know you're like, oh man, I did this and it's working and I did it on, you know, a dime compared to those thousands of dollars that I would have cost with an agency.

Speaker 3: 15:59

You know the thing. Oh sorry, Monty, no, go ahead. The thing you remind me of, julian, is the I have an idea power of the AI tools. So part of my personal sort of on-ramp to using the tools as opposed to just thinking of it as can you write me an email or you know something sort of tactical to it has been sort of the playing morning. I have an idea.

Speaker 3: 16:26

Games with it, Meaning, you know, literally spin into creative moment for five minutes, as if I'm reading the newspaper or reading some blogs or just doing what you do to kind of start your morning and get you know, sort of inspired by some new ideas. I will throw prompts into AI, some of the AI tools, and start my way into it. I have an idea to do blank. Help me create the concept. How might I communicate it? Who else is doing it? What's the best practice? Who recently failed at that? You know just to unpack ideas a little bit and you know, for small businesses, entrepreneurial businesses, startup businesses, you're at a shortage of just sheer thought, partnership, thought leadership around you because you're lean and mean and you know AI can play such an important partner role to that by getting all that kind of jumpstarting the idea forward. All you want it to do is to say, you know what? There's something there, go figure that out. Or to say, oh, that's a waste of time, and either one is perfectly acceptable.

Speaker 1: 17:34

Yeah, all of these are. I mean, it definitely saves time, it definitely can help you with creativity, it can definitely help you with strategy. These are all really effective ways. I think that marketers are using AI these days.

Speaker 1: 17:52

I'd love to hear your guys' thoughts and have a discussion around the negative aspect of AI. I mean, here's a big thing in the news. One of the recent things here lately has been about plagiarism. Right, we've got all the stories about, you know, the president of Harvard who has been found. You know that most of their stuff is plagiarized. And you know, and I think, and you see companies now I think it's the Wall Street Journal has filed a lawsuit against either open AI or somebody about one of these tools, about plagiarism from their content, you know.

Speaker 1: 18:37

So there's definitely a negative side to AI as well. I think we run the risk of not only overuse, overdependence upon that, if you would, but also maybe not doing our due diligence on the output or the result. Right, for instance, you know I do a lot of LinkedIn and social media stuff and for me, it's very clear when you see people that have used AI only to create their posts. Right, I mean, it just has its own little formula and its own footprint, if you would, for what AI is. So what's your guys' thoughts about the negative aspect of AI? Maybe cautions for people about how they should go about using it?

Speaker 2: 19:32

I think back to my SEO days. That's kind of how I came up professionally with like the 2010s especially, and I think it's like any other tool. I think I mean, shoot, we saw the same thing with content spamming in the early days of SEO. You get huge teams and you know, offshore to just make a bunch of content. That kind of sounds a little different and I don't think, as I don't think, ai necessarily provides too much different from that. I think there still is going to be the how do you actually pluck at someone's emotions? And that's something that AI I think can do. It can replicate. But, man, if you're going to get really lucky at the AI, it just happens to hit the right chord that you're trying to hit with your marketing effort.

Speaker 2: 20:22

But you know there's going to be a degradation in general, I think, though, and people's skills in marketing, to be sure. I think there will be a little bit. You know, maybe a few less people that can pick up a photo shopper in InDesign and make something really stunning out of it, because why would you do that? Why would you do it?

Speaker 3: 20:41

the hard way. So one of those things that I've encountered in preparing information or sharing information that I've compiled with clients and with businesses has been that very natural watch out question of sources. What source did you use or get or gather that information from? Because otherwise it just feels like, you know, a regorge of Wikipedia, right? And so I'm very clear with prompts, particularly when I'm either summarizing or organizing facts and stats around something to make certain that I'm asking for it to cite sources. Some of the tools do that better than others. Okay, in terms of making certain that there are proper citations so that you know where that information came from and then, obviously, can dig further into that specific if you wish, but at least it's there to start with and you know that that information isn't just some sort of algorithmic sort of answer out of something, or it's just something that's kind of repeated out of a Wikipedia post, not to pick it Wikipedia, but you know, as opposed to, it actually came from a factual, statistical citation source.

Speaker 2: 21:57

Yeah, the echo chamber, you know, gets same with any kind of crowded marketing space. Right, you got someone writing the thousandth blog on the subject, referencing those previous 999 and this is just telephone.

Speaker 3: 22:10

It's just telephone.

Speaker 2: 22:11

Exactly. Yeah, this is sure to enhance that right. Like I mean, gpt was kind of cut off from information before. Gpt was a thing for a while and it kind of still is to a certain degree, and I think it always will be to a certain degree, because there is just an echo chamber there and the more you're sort of taking in your own information as a source of information, you know what is that saying individual that has their master as themselves, as a fool or something like that. That's exactly exactly what we're probably going to see ending up.

Speaker 1: 22:43

But you know, you have the same opportunity as a marketer to pick that thread, to pick that specific thing that emotionally engages people, to stand out from the pack and I think, that's always, you know, probably since the beginning of marketing, kind of been the trick you know, one of the things that I found that's very important if you're creating copy and content with AI, is that you have to train it on the individual's voice that you want. You can't like pull eight different articles and say, give me a new one. It's got to be trained to the voice. That, and whether it's your client yourself, however, and the way you do that is by giving it things that you have written or said you know itself, so that it can learn. This is how you speak. Now we can take the subject and we can create something unique based on how you speak.

Speaker 1: 23:39

But I think the other thing that's extremely important with AI is that there's always excuse me, there's always the same follow up and follow through with let's read through this and let's make sure that it sounds exactly like me. So there's always some editing that you have to do. I think where a lot of people get in trouble is they just grab a bunch of stuff, plug it in, say give me this my input, my output, and, for the sake of time and speed and everything else, it's you know. Oh, here it is. You still have to think of it as a first draft.

Speaker 3: 24:12

You still have to think of it that way, because otherwise, to your point it, it it runs the risk of sounding literally alike. No matter what I'm talking about or what question I'm asking, it all sort of has that same rhythmic inflection to it that demonstrates that it didn't have any added judging to it.

Speaker 2: 24:32

I liken it to a blind painter or a deaf composer to a certain degree, and probably more so of one that has never seen or has never heard right and so on. It's gone blind or gone deaf. It it is a matter of curation. I think you know. To see, the tool of generative AI at this point is something that will be a replacement, that will just do everything for you. It can appreciate its own work.

Speaker 2: 24:57

It doesn't know how it's landed right when it plays, if it plays a chord, it doesn't know if that was a sour note or a melodious, other than maybe, if that's been documented somewhere, that this is melodious and this is sour, right, and so that's really what that's really what it is Is. Is you know, when I produce an image, people are like oh, that's amazing, and it probably must have taken you no time at all. Not really. Normally does take me about a half an hour to an hour and about two, 300 generations at least, because a lot of them are really weird. It's like having a face put on you that you've never had before, right, and you can't then go look in the mirror to know what a smile looks like or to know what a frown looks like, and that's really its key limitation right now. I think the thing that that people kind of miss that you know you got to tell it when it's smiling and when it's frowning, otherwise it's got no idea Totally.

Speaker 4: 25:47

Yeah, I think. Yeah so.

Speaker 4: 25:50

I think some of the other concerns with AI in my opinion are one there's it's kind of already becoming an over saturated market, so there's a lot of companies doing the exact same thing. How do you pick the right vendor? And so I think that's something to watch out for when you're interviewing new vendors and seeing you know what, what types of services they add. If you're looking at like a lead generation tool or something that can help you in a sales cycle like where are they pulling their information from and how far down the ladder are they using the exact same database, like a zoom info, to pull their data from.

Speaker 4: 26:25

And then I think the other side of that is also privacy concerns. You know you're a company, you're putting a lot of potentially private information into these AI tools and you know how is it going to get leaked, what misinformation is out there as well that you could potentially be a target for. You know my husband works for a very large, established corporation and so that corporation is decided they cannot use chat gpt outside because it's there's main privacy issues, so they've decided to develop their own tool for that. So I think some of the larger issues come with the privacy, working with your legal department and understanding you know what is allowed to be used versus what isn't. And then that oversaturation of the market that we're already kind of starting to see.

Speaker 3: 27:15

You know, jillian, that's a really great point. I've had businesses I've worked with larger ones that are public, very public facing, and there has been been that sort of soft watch out about you know at what point does information inside allow itself to become information or communication that goes outside? And there's a lot of kind of shouldering it back a bit going on right now because there is that concern about you know how far out into substantiation and claims and information specifics are you as opposed to simply, you know, promotional tone or or Communication of a key thing that you've already fed AI to begin with Informationally, like you suggested, monty, there's there you can definitely feel a little bit of Breaking or, you know, hitting that pedal a little bit to slow down how Aggressively it's used in a public forum for the larger companies or for those that are just much more public facing.

Speaker 2: 28:23

Oh, there's always. I mean, there's a massive amount of headlines. I I've probably never done marketing that's gotten more impact or more conversation started. Then there is. But then there's this Automatic reticence. Well like, well, that's AI. Be careful what you're looking at on social media, because that could be AI and it is probably something like an end Design, right, early days of adobe, early days of photoshop. Right, you'd make these really compelling looking images and, yes, they were fake, but Gotcha, you looked at them. Right, kind of the end of the day day what matters like all PR is good PR.

Speaker 2: 28:58

Exactly, and I get that a lot. I get a lot. I take a lot of phone calls with people that are like at bigger companies, especially within my industry, like how are you doing this? And I'm like I work in a small business, that's how I'm doing it. You can't do it, you're not going to be able to do it today. Uh, that's really the You're gonna. You're gonna really struggle to to to put anything out that isn't, you know, nilled by hand for some reason. Uh, which is, I think, I think it's something we're pumping the brakes now, right, but it's I. I sort of, when I hear people talking about it, sort of like, well, and we're really gonna slow down this, it's like, yeah, like movie makers in the 90s really slowed down on CGI because it looked a little wonky, right, like, yeah, we can't, we can't.

Speaker 3: 29:38

It's a moment. It's just about getting a little bit better controller competency with it, but it's not slow, you know.

Speaker 1: 29:45

You know it's funny. You know it's funny is the stories that came out. You know where elan was saying oh, let's put a pause, let's put a pause on the development of ai and everything else, because it could take over, ruin the world, humanity could come to an end, and so let's put a 90 day pause or something like that on it. And then, like 90 days later, he came out with his Right, we're not gonna pause, we're moving forward.

Speaker 2: 30:13

So I just you know.

Speaker 1: 30:16

It this. It totally has been a game changer, I think, for the budget restrained companies, you know, the startups, the solopreneurs, the you know, just to be able to save Money and time, seth to your point, you know, for smaller, smaller companies or smaller teams, I should say that need to do this and need to Maybe put the brakes on hiring. You can definitely save some time. But what do you guys feel like are now emerging technologies? So we've had chat. Gpt Claude has come out, you know. We now have elans that's live on twitter. Which, by the way, are you guys on that at all? I think I'm. One of the interesting aspects is this bullseye driving, but you know.

Speaker 1: 31:06

Yeah, exactly, exactly. But you know that it's pulling all of its information From twitter conversations Right and from and from that, his whole network there. I think that's very interesting. But what do you guys see that's emerging and things that you guys think will be a game changer, you know, in this, in 2024?

Speaker 2: 31:31

I think what chat gpt is doing right now of the ability to train your own gpt and and tuning in general, and so, I think, is the terminology that people have been landing on, whether it's generative ai imagery or text or what what have you Reinventing the wheel each time you sit down to a prompt? Is is problematic and it's it's just, it's not. You're not doing what you need to do in a business which is making the, the task you do over and over again, simpler each time. And and I think that the, what I've really focused, like been focusing my efforts on, is making sure that I have those tuned up. But you know, if, if a project's taking me a long time to really dial something in, probably my fault that I don't at least have something to fall back on that is well tuned. Hasn't a synthetic figured out already that I know I can reliably get something out?

Speaker 2: 32:21

Uh, yeah, I think that's. That's one of those things and again, you know, I think that's like a december release For them as well, so it's pretty recent stuff, but, um, I see the ability to tune mid-journey same sort of thing. You can set up tuning profiles to really nail an aesthetic Really be able to make like an entire comic book, look like the same art and character, to kind of roughly look the book the same. Uh, that that really is the the building your intellectual property within the space. I think for now.

Speaker 3: 32:48

I'm seeing. The thing I'm probably personally most intrigued about right now is something like captions, that is, um, you know, I at heart I'm a marketing guy, so I'm storytelling right and, and the ability to Do that in a video format that solves gobs of learning Kinds of issues. I don't just mean promotional and retailing kinds of messages, but training, explainer videos, sales presentation materials, pitch materials, pitch deck items and inclusions, everything that, at the end of the day, takes the, the need to read something away and does it in a compelling and interesting fashion and does that at my fingertips. I mean, you know, I'm not trying to make it sound like that's an instantaneous generation, but it's way more efficient and effective to solve so many opportunities to educate. Aware, I'm not using the word promote deliberately. I'm talking about Internal or stakeholder types of communications that just make it more accessible and more compelling to engage on an idea or an investment strategy or an operational practice, or Training, hiring, recruiting, culture building all the things that take the AI tools out of just being the marketing thing.

Speaker 4: 34:12

So I think it's really exciting to bring global teams together. So I have teams all over the world and you know it's very hard to produce content when you're Not in person all the time. And so and I take that back when we say not produce content, but, like you know, I don't have to send a team now to go do video. Um, you know editing or filming with potential Internal employees. So, like, right now we're working kind of on a social strategy on how do we Get little clips of our engineers on different social networks and they are, all you know, across the pond from me.

Speaker 4: 34:49

So how am I going to do that and get those clips that I need in order to develop a strategy around that social, to to build our audience, and so, when, when I look at the fact that we're spread out across the globe, these AI tools can certainly help with. You know, videotaping. You can sit there in front of your computer, create a compelling message and then I can work with that in in front of my computer and actually get that, rather than having to travel back and forth From site to site. So I think it's both cost savings bringing global teams together. Um, and it's not just on the marketing front. You know it's like what do you need from an organization that you can? You know training videos, for instance. You don't have to sit there with a, with a whole, exactly as well. So, yeah, I just think it's a really especially as people work more and more remotely and are not in an office setting.

Speaker 4: 35:43

These tools are going to help us across the organization, help bring us together on a go-to-market strategy, on a business strategy, on operations and everything else.

Speaker 2: 35:54

I'd add one other thing and something as I would just say, as a group, right marketers, as a group, we've never done a very good job at is making things accessible, making how to? How do I, how can I?

Speaker 3: 36:05

those questions are brutal right, marketing is a good thing.

Speaker 2: 36:11

People are the worst at it, you know and not, and not just the basic accessibility of how. But you know, people with disabilities, right, people are unable to see the stuff that we're doing right.

Speaker 2: 36:23

You mentioned, with CAG standards, to to your average marketer or what you know. It's not, it's not, but it's really been at our feet. Right, we produce the things that people hear and see out of a business and just, you know, as a group, right, not pointing any fingers, but as a group, we have done a terrible job. And AI seems to be something that's going to pull us out of that fire to a certain degree, because, man, nobody has designed the internet for people with, with you know, visual disabilities.

Speaker 2: 36:49

It's outrageous, like I worked in the field for a while. It's just like you look around it, it's egregious. These are things that are going to be able to actually help help us because help us, help ourselves, because you know we weren't doing it, we weren't making things accessible, and the fact that now you can have Dolly say what am I doing, dolly say what am I looking at here, and man, it does a good job, I mean, wow, it's really accurate Probably sometimes picks things out of an image I don't see myself. You know that that's super exciting and kind of early for me because something I was always Kind of upset about in general.

Speaker 1: 37:23

I think you make a fantastic point there, seth.

Speaker 1: 37:26

You know that and something, quite honestly, I haven't considered because it's it hasn't been Um, significantly on my radar as of late, and I think there's a lot of marketers, you know, you don't, you tend not to, you know, put a lot of attention into something that's not like directly in front of your face but Um, but yeah, I think that is an excellent point about how AI can help, from my standpoint, with what we do in podcasting is, uh, one of the biggest game changers that has been made so far is the ability to do text based editing.

Speaker 1: 38:05

Yeah, um, and that's all AI. You know that I can now, instead of having to watch through a one hour episode of something and try and pull out pieces and components and cut it all up and all this other kind of stuff, it's like going back to my when I was first out of college and you know the lady was having to do markup. Now it's just almost like a click of a button get rid of all the ums, the os, the so's, but you know, and and then you know, jillian, you mentioned uh, tofu to be able to come back and then repurpose that content immediately into all the different formats that you need it. It's mind blowing how much time you can save on it, so so.

Speaker 3: 38:50

To me, to me what you just said monti, is is sort of the, the, the benefit I keep trying to talk about with people who are Perhaps either nervous or uncertain or confused. Okay, about, you know how do I actually apply this to my business? Is it just to write email, for instance? Okay, um, is that I talk about it as creator create? We are creators, not compilers. We took all the compiling aspect out of it and moved that to a really smart set of tools that can help us speed up editing processes like what you just described, right? Or take a piece of content, an anchor piece of content to Gillian's very first example and explode it into various forms and formats that are then back to where we need to them to be, in order to just speed up the whole process.

Speaker 2: 39:45

One other thing something I've been working on this week, actually taking large amounts of data, having an analyze for attribution, so I'm sure we all struggle with right Is how do you get that really figure out, that click to cash right, have some idea of where is this money coming from? And we all I certainly sold to clients before is like you're going to know where your spin's going and how you're actually going to do it. I say, yeah, right, really separating out whether someone is coming to you because they just know your brand from a trade show versus they're doing kind of an organic search around the thought leadership. It's very hard to separate out that traffic Combining stuff I'm getting from analytics, which is just neutered and terrible these days stuff out of HubSpot and then using recording stuff out of Gong.

Speaker 2: 40:34

So actually seeing how the sales calls are going and getting the text out of that, I'm now able to, instead of having to rely on the sales guy who's never going to help me. He's never going to tell me where that lead source is. I'm getting the transcript from the Zoom recording and I'm not even having to read through it anymore. The tools will actually tell you out of that recording what the sentiment was in terms of how they got to your business. That is like finally closing a loop for me that I could never do unless in some previous lives, where I would just I would go be the sales guy. I'd be like, okay, I'll also take demos, I'll be the marketing guy, but I'm also going to take demos because I actually need to hear from these people what they're running from so I can build something for them to run too.

Speaker 2: 41:18

The really hard as a marketer because you just if you're in a pure marketer like I am now take demos once in a while. It's really hard to know what that is without having that data at your fingertip. And good luck staying awake watching people's demos all day. You watch one like goodness, the next one's going to be hard and the third one's going to put you to sleep.

Speaker 1: 41:37

Yeah, that was such an excellent lead into what I wanted to talk with you guys about next, which is oftentimes marketing and sales are guilty of being these independent silos out there that don't really communicate with one another. While we don't understand where the leads are coming from, the sales people are saying you're not giving me good leads and there's no insight into what the conversations are, and stuff like that. So that was fantastic. Can you guys you know Jillian and Kurt can you guys speak to how AI has assisted you from a team standpoint, not only in the marketing area, but how it has maybe unified the sales and what you do within that as well?

Speaker 4: 42:22

Yeah, so I think on the sales front. So, as you mentioned, there's always some tension right within every organization. It's a marketing and sales push and pull. I feel like I've been very lucky to have less of that in my career and really work directly with the sales team to understand their needs. So you know, I think AI has helped in understanding, like, once we're mapping out the personas of who we're trying to target, how do we then create an effective strategy together, rather than just having a marketing strategy versus a sales strategy, and how do we combine efforts? Because my approach with sales is to always listen into them first. I will provide my marketing expertise, but ultimately they're dealing with the customer every day, in and out, and they understand where customer pain points are and what the customer journey looks like to assess.

Speaker 4: 43:14

Point about marketing attribution I was deep last year in Pardot and trying to run reporting and Pardot is just such an old tool at this point I call it Pardot purgatory that's my kind of coin phrase for it. But you know, the marketing attribution models and helping with pulling the data in and understanding those lead sources can help me with my sales team say this is what's working, this is what's not, you know and then building a business case together that we go and get funding for that. We put an integrated brand or strategy together and we can look from a short term perspective to a long term perspective on how that's going to get us from point A to the high growth that we're looking to achieve, whether it's a 5x or a 10x scale over the next year or two.

Speaker 3: 44:02

You know I've been fortunate, like Jillian, to work with some sales leaders who are really intuitive about the need to put that information together to act on it better, okay, as opposed to just simply sort of managing the traditional sales funnel. So the traditional sales funnel metrics, we all knew them, we all grew up with them. They're, all you know, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip and down you go Right, but the fact is it misses out on so much actionable information. Okay, in terms of who's really the right lead to go after, what really is the high performing channel, I cannot for a minute pretend that everybody actually behaves in a very A, goes to B to C, to D and gets to the bottom of the funnel. Yay, and there's this AOLN conversion. I can't pretend that anymore. There is no funnel right Today. Everybody gets their information and then cross sources it with some sort of social or informal research or word of mouth research. And then there's the impulsive information that kind of just drops in.

Speaker 3: 45:08

And painting that as a bit of a swamp, deliberately, because the sales leaders that are either part of my organization or that I've worked with in other organizations, who were really savvy about saying the metrics are critical, of course, to helping us stay on top of the business. But I want to take attribution to the next level. Where I can match it to customer personas, frequency clusters. I can do something actionable in targeting or a focusing my sales teams on go after these people. More than these people, these types of businesses and these verticals. More than these and it doesn't matter what business category I'm talking about there's the hunger in the sales organization to be able to partner with the marketing organization to get a better sense of I'm not just chasing a funnel drop down, I'm actually chasing a customer and I want more that look and act like that one and fewer that I'm going to waste my time on, that are either slow to convert or one time own ways or whatever else.

Speaker 1: 46:18

I am so glad that you said that tired.

Speaker 2: 46:25

We're all carrying around a lie. We've been carrying around a lie all these years.

Speaker 1: 46:33

The lie is that there's this cookie cutter funnel thing that you just start at the top and you work right down to the bottom. It's not, it's a dang plate of spaghetti. Yeah, there's one person that you're trying to go after and it's how. You know what are these touch points and it is insane. You know there's. There is no cookie cutter and the tools can help right.

Speaker 3: 46:57

So that's been and I'm still learning my way into that, but it's because I can see the way. Seth, to your point. You can compile disparate pieces of information, disparate pieces of the way we're either tracking or or measuring activities, and put that together in a way that matches up with personas and demographics and whatever other kinds of clustering of, and categorizations of, customer behaviors or customer sales activities that you want to get into to get more actionable, because, at the end of the end of the day, limited people, limited money, limited time and you got to go after those that drive the best long term return for you.

Speaker 1: 47:43

So true. Well, in this last segment here, I'd love to hear some practical things like what's your favorite, either AI tool or set of AI tools that you use on a daily basis, how, how are you using them for for a purpose, and how can another business maybe take your lead on those tools and apply it to their own businesses? So, jillian, you mentioned tofu. Why don't we start with you?

Speaker 4: 48:22

Yeah, so tofu is very much in its early stages. They're really getting there. They really just started last year, or, yes, we're in 2024 now. It's a bit of a mess, but you know they are looking for new customers to try out their platform as well so they can go through some beta testing and make sure that their tool is being used in the right way, and their team is absolutely fabulous. So, you know, I think there were like five people when we first started talking with them, but the tool is is great.

Speaker 4: 48:57

You go in there, you can set up all of your brand guidelines, you can put all of your digital, digital assets in there and from there, you know you can say, hey, my goal is to create these types of pieces of content from this acre content, or I need to start a whole new campaign and what am I looking to achieve? And so you know something like an ebook that we will use from time to time, or a case study where I am looking to. You know, get as much traction out of that as possible. I can sit there, I can upload it and I can go in and individually change any of the copy that I need. It's a super, super user friendly tool. I can click in and change any of the graphics, so I would highly recommend that you guys check it out. I think it's the next kind of big AI tool that's going to help marketers in the future.

Speaker 4: 49:48

Aside from tofu unbounce for landing pages, I've been using in the past chat GPT seems to be kind of a daily use. If I just have an idea where I need to start, chat GPT is typically where I go. You know I also look at Jasper AI as well, and you know you can always got to watch out for grammatical errors too, so I just want to make sure that nobody's just copying and pasting things. But those are, those are my kind of three, three main sources that I've been using on a day to day, and I'm always looking for more tools that I can use, especially as a one woman show. I've been taking notes this entire time with all of the ones you've mentioned as well, and I was recently at a revenue marketing summit where they were going over. You know, aside from mid journey, there's open art AI, so I want to kind of dive into that in the next coming months.

Speaker 2: 50:42

Yeah, there's a certain degree to which, like selecting the right tools, kind of like selecting the right restaurant or the right pizza place sometimes right, like we're at a stage with AI that, like you know, if you can purchase the thing from the website, maybe it's not good.

Speaker 4: 50:59

You know, there's almost like this like hipster, hipster lens.

Speaker 2: 51:02

You need to apply to the thing where you know, like all marketing right over the past, especially over the past 30 years, it's there's like an arbitrage component to it. You're trying to find the thing that that is, that no one's doing yet right. And if no one's doing it yet, it's not expensive yet right and you probably have a chance of again not being in the echo chamber and maybe be in, maybe standing out, maybe differentiating.

Speaker 2: 51:29

So there is a certain degree where I encourage you like don't wait for the ones, like don't wait for some things to reach this, this grace, as I use tools, sometimes once or twice and never use them again because I get what I need out of them, but maybe they're not, you know, and there are a ton of those out. But the answer to the question in terms of my normal work for, like, obviously, like GBT, everyone should be using it. Okay, get the $20 one subscription, use GPT-4. If you don't know how to use it, sit down and ask it. Like it really isn't, like this is one of the things. Like there's no excuse. There really is no excuse. If you can type, if you can chat with somebody, you can text message somebody, you can probably figure out how to use this tool. And you know it's too. It's like, as adults, like we kind of, have lost this idea that you can yeah, you can sit down and study, you can read an instruction manual if you have. You know it's okay if it takes you 10 minutes.

Speaker 3: 52:18

Seth, no one wants to read. No one wants to read, right? Yeah, I really want to right.

Speaker 2: 52:23

But I will say you know a really powerful thing using these DINNERDIV AI tools with Photoshop, because Photoshop now has its own DINNERDIV AI components, and so a thing that you get out of a lot of AI and why I've been able to actually make AI stuff kind of ready for corporate consumption, is that kind of just run it through Photoshop real quick and remove some stuff or replace some hands that look really scary, or replace some facial expressions that aren't quite right for the, for the. What we're looking at. So those tools, those two tools together, it's like Photoshop is going nowhere. They figure out exactly how to live in the AI space and as they can improve those tools, they'll be a lot better. But you know, if you're not, if you're not running again your first passive an idea through GPT and just saying what else should I be thinking about here? It's kind of at least throw out a pun or two you can use. You know that you didn't think about and it's at least handy for that.

Speaker 3: 53:23

I have to say you guys mentioned all the tools that I would have readily said hey, jump in and start playing. If you're not playing with them, but for sure you've got to be sort of taking that first important step with chat, gpt, all the time and all the other things you've mentioned. I think the tools for me that are most interesting in the coming 12 months, in terms of my anticipated use, adoption or proliferation even, are going to be the ones that do merge text and audio, or text and pictures and video, the ones that help me explain things better or are more visually oriented. I made the funny sarcasm of no one wants to read, but the reality is people learn visually, you know, particularly in complex situations where I want to make it a little more accessible, and that is, in every sense of that word about accessibility and then, as a consequence, those tools that put those things together and help me explain something faster or more visually, or matching words and pictures and video altogether, are the ones that are more powerful for me to use right now. They help with salespeople, they help with HR teams, they help with operations teams, they help with investment conversations in terms of pitch decks and everything else with it and they also, of course, help with all straight to consumer sort of marketing and communication and promotion.

Speaker 3: 54:45

The only other thing that I probably jump into is this notion of just making certain that there's really thoughtful in the moment use of facts and fact checking. So, for instance, if I'm on a longer meeting, in a longer meeting or on a longer meeting and we're having a brainstorm about whatever, I'll run top 10 reasons why yes and no, I'll run pros and cons while I'm in the meeting. Right, because it inevitably generates a nice, very objective side by side pluses and minuses kinds of conversation and it helps focus the discussion, which to me, is another piece of how the tools help jumpstart. So I'm looking forward to using more of the tools interactively in those regards to help shape ideas and just speed ideas faster, to either keep kill test kinds of formats, as opposed to getting hung up in the paralysis that it often does, or the echo chamber of well, we could do this, we could do this. Well, it's not perfect. Well, it's never gonna be perfect. It's like you got to shape and go it gets you out.

Speaker 2: 56:00

One of the best things about GVT is it gets you out of your industry expertise right. So it is a very powerful thing as a marketer knowing your industry right, knowing your vertical, knowing the language they use. But there is the danger of there's an echo chamber there right. There's the basic principles that every thought leader talks about.

Speaker 2: 56:21

But if you're in IT services, well there's probably some stuff that's already been worked out in accounting right In terms of like how you keep your customers happy. That can easily apply Stuff from older industries or different or just kind of tangential industries that you're not going to those conferences, you're not talking to those people, you have no way of organic, you're not reading their industry rags by any means. Gpt is, and so it's funny how much wisdom you can actually get from the thing Just by again, just run it by Someone might have learned some lessons in another industry about what you're looking to accomplish.

Speaker 1: 56:58

Speaking of wisdom, we're about, at times, all closed with this. It's almost impossible with the speed of which these tools are coming to market. Even chat GPT and the changes that chat GPT is making is somewhat difficult to stay up with, right, I mean, as marketers. There's only so much time in a day. You're not going to follow all these tools all the time and you just kind of hear things randomly here and there from like shows like this and stuff like that. One of the things, the best things that I found early on is there's always some geeks, nerds, computer guys that they're going to track it all Enthusiasts, I'm sure that's what you mean, thank you.

Speaker 1: 57:50

Thank you Enthusiasts that are going to track it all and that's their passion, and there's two resources that I've found that do this. One is a newsletter called Superhuman, founded on Twitter, actually X. The other is Decode, and these guys it blows my mind. I mean they're continually updating you on the different changes that chat, gpt and all these other AIs are making. They're continually putting in new tools and they have an entire old school like yellow pages, if you would of all the tools that are available by category. What they do and everything else is unbelievable. So I highly recommend that, as marketers, just jump out on line to do a search for AI updated newsletters. You'll find one Superhuman and Decode, or the two that, I excuse me, are the two that I track the most, but those even with those.

Speaker 3: 59:04

AppSumo is another one that's in that same vein. Appsumo does a daily digestie bite-size-y kind of piece for it.

Speaker 2: 59:16

Yep, fantastic. Yeah, sign up for them and try them. That's the best way. Just try everything you see Now, don't just read about them. Sit down and try them. That's the only way.

Speaker 1: 59:29

You guys. This has been fantastic. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for all your information and insight. It did not disappoint. I trust that everybody that's listening today has at least picked out one thing that you can really take and go use, not only in your job but in your day-to-day activities MUSIC.