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Oh, My. Talking' AI! w/ Brent Wees
6 Plays1 year ago
It's often easy to chase after the latest shiny object. In marketing, new tools appear with emerging trends or capabilities faster than anyone can learn how to properly use them. This inaugural episode of More Than You Can Chew offers a practical foundation upon which marketers can begin to delve into using AI as part of their workflows with practical applications outside the scope of just listening to a podcast or seeing a conference session on the topic.
From collaboration on outcomes to specific tips on prompts to insights about how a tool like ChatGPT can be used for both public-facing and internal needs, listeners will get actionable takeaways that they can use to build out their own processes and workflows.
In addition, as part of what will become a tradition with More Than You Can Chew, Brent shares his favorite restaurants in New Orleans and his hometown of Toronto: Rosedale and Dailo, respectively.
Two highlights from each restaurant from host, Dane Saville:
Truffle Hainanese Chicken (Dailo)
foie fat rice, scallion ginger oil, confit garlic sambal, crispy garlic & onion
Fried Chicken (Rosedale)
with Mac’n’Cheese, Smothered Greens and Tabasco Honey
As always, if you like what you've heard, please follow the podcast on your favorite platform and share it with your network on social media!
If you're looking for SEO or PPC services, or you'd like an audit of your website or content, please reach out to Dane Saville at dane.saville@searchlabdigital.com.
Thanks to the leadership at SearchLab Digital for making this podcast possible.
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Transcript
00:00:15
Speaker
Welcome
Dane Saville's Podcast Return
00:00:16
Speaker
everyone to More Than You Can Chew. My name is Dane Saville. I will be your host. I am the Director of Brand Experience at Search Lab Digital. And let me tell you, it's been quite a while, about two years,
00:00:34
Speaker
maybe a little longer, since I did my last podcast.
Role at Search Lab Digital
00:00:38
Speaker
I have a previous award-winning podcast at a different agency that I had helped co-found that I had since left and now here at Search Lab after serving as director of SEO.
00:00:53
Speaker
the past two years and really leading through a transformative period for the company, building out a lot of processes, doing a lot of things, building off a tremendous foundation from our COO, Greg Gifford, one of the top minds in local SEO, literally ah platinum product expert for Google Business Profile, which I mean, I'm not even you know bronze yet, but you know it's you i'm just um I'm excited. i'm
Focus on AI in Marketing
00:01:23
Speaker
I'm excited they've afforded me this opportunity.
00:01:25
Speaker
I'm so glad you're here today for this inaugural episode. And let me just say, ah when I first thought about how I wanted to kick things off, I knew that I wanted someone who could bring some real insight, bring some real personality. And I thought, well, you know what?
00:01:51
Speaker
Damned if I don't, why don't I just bring back Brent Weiss, who is the first guest of my previous podcast. Now, of course,
Target Audience for AI Discussion
00:01:59
Speaker
the topic's going be very different. Today, we're going to talk about AI, but I don't want to have this wide swath of generalities like...
00:02:10
Speaker
oh, you know, ai is supposed to be, um you know, a tool for your people to use, not to replace your people, right? Like we know a lot of this just general information, right? ChatGPT has a cutoff date in 2023. ChatGPT4 can access some more current information.
00:02:30
Speaker
You have any wide array of tools at your disposal, depending on what type of Burchmore, M.D.: marketing tactic or strategy that you're trying to leverage it for, so I wanted to narrow it down so today am going to be asking Brent. Brenton Burchmore, about. Brenton
Podcast Title Explanation
00:02:53
Speaker
Whether you're a digital marketing manager.
00:02:56
Speaker
whether you're um you know of a small business in rural Idaho, or you're a marketing director of a 15 store dealership, or the marketing director or chief marketing officer of 20 plus staff law firm, whatever it might be, if you have not really sunk your teeth into ai where to start, what tools best to get people acclimated using AI.
00:03:33
Speaker
What are some tips in that narrow scope of how to best use that tool?
Episode Goals
00:03:43
Speaker
because i just don't wanna have these broad conversations. More than you can chew, the whole concept of this is to, well, that there's that old phrase, you know you've bitten off more than you can chew, right? I wanna take a bite into some topic where it's going to be way more than what we can cover in the short amount of time, because I want to keep these brief, right? I value your time.
00:04:08
Speaker
My time is very limited. I want to
Introduction of Brent Weiss
00:04:11
Speaker
make sure that within the brief time we have, you get something to use to then expand your portfolio, expand your skill set.
00:04:24
Speaker
So when we bring Brent on, that's, I'm gonna kind of try to bring him into focus here about, again, that launch point, where to start dabbling and how to best, how to get a best product or output.
00:04:39
Speaker
from that tool. So we'll hear what he has to say. And as you know, I'm sure I'll mention in the interview with him, you know, Brett's, you know, accolades and background.
Brent Weiss on Interactive Learning
00:04:51
Speaker
I mean, he's a guy who has been at the forefront of a lot of different emerging trends and and tools and everything. And he's a really brilliant guy. And he's actually been traveling the country talking to people, teaching people, workshopping about using AI to give people actual practical. So this is not just some...
00:05:10
Speaker
you know, some guy talking about, you know, best practices without actually ever doing those best practices. He is a practitioner who is actually getting people hands-on experience. So even though this podcast won't be hands-on, I'm going to try to tailor this share conversation, excuse me, towards something that tangible you can take away, right?
Nationwide Speaking Engagements
00:05:37
Speaker
Some sort of tip insight. You go, you know what, even though he's not working shop, workshopping in front of me right now, I can use this idea and I can apply it outside of this podcast. So ah without further ado, well, first again, let me thank you again for joining us, but without further ado, let's go ahead and bring in our guest, Mr. Brent Weiss.
00:06:02
Speaker
All right, it's time for more than you can chew. And once again, i have a first guest who is a first guest of the last podcast I did. Now, I think I was probably a little bit better back then because I had things, a lot more time to really plan things out. And it's been two years since I've really even been on a podcast alone, hosted one. But I am so excited because I have Brent Weiss with me here today. Brent, how have things been going?
00:06:28
Speaker
Fine, but I'm really, truly worried for you if it's taken you two years to figure out like a simple 15 minutes of time together. Like you know maybe maybe we should get a GoFundMe started for you or something. I don't know.
00:06:41
Speaker
I'm good, man. I'm i'm good. I'm busy as always. So I have zero complaints. Great, well,
Moderating Educational Workshops
00:06:47
Speaker
we're gonna get right into the meat and potatoes of it, no pun intended, more than you can chew, talking about food.
00:06:52
Speaker
um You know, were there's a big thing going on, right? A transformative sort of conversations around AI, and I don't wanna rehash sort of conversations around like, hey, you need to have it as ah tool for your people, not to replace your people, right? We we kind of know the the general sense of really how we wanna integrate just kind of the conception of AI into different workflows.
00:07:13
Speaker
And you're a guy who now has been kind of traveling around and not kind of, you have been traveling around speaking to different folks in different industries about AI. Give us some context into like sort of how you kind of got into this role of helping people understand how to integrate different AI tools and and and workflows.
00:07:36
Speaker
ah in ah it's ah It's a great setup question, by the way, so thanks for asking it. Because again, there's there's a lot of chatter about it, and of course. like you you can't You can't get out of a feed daily without someone posting something about um AI.
00:07:51
Speaker
And how can be used? ah my My passion projects now seem to be
Early Agency Days and Innovation
00:07:57
Speaker
moderating larger educational style workshops. but But in reality, that grew out of my early days as an agency owner and as a product builder, where at different facets of technology evolution and how it is impacting a dealer's life,
00:08:16
Speaker
From the onset of even responsive design websites, I was asked to go out, speak to groups and people, and help educate them on what the technology is and how it's starting to
Dealer Debates and AI Learning Evolution
00:08:26
Speaker
evolve. So even as far back as when i was around going around just educating on responsive design websites, I always wanted to do it in a way that there was interactivity and in actual learning or
00:08:42
Speaker
collaboration, play, coursing around, no matter what you whatever you call it. But from the very first session I ever did, i was um you know dressing people up. Kevin Fry would love this. Dressing people up in garbage bags and putting safety glasses on them and making them like pound marshmallows to explain latency speeds and high-speed networks.
00:09:00
Speaker
I used to do family feud style things where I would plot two sides of the room against each other while they learned about technology and the way things were evolving. But then as i I kept doing that, I always kept challenging myself to make things even better. And um and you were a big help in this first one.
00:09:18
Speaker
Years ago, even before it became, I'm not doing this to blow smoke up my own ass. It's just about three years ago, we did the first dealer debate that you remember you were a part of.
00:09:31
Speaker
And what we did was we put two teams together and taught them about automation and AI. And that's really where the collaborative efforts of what has become my, my talk tracks and the sessions I've been putting together now kind of grew out of like these debates where we were putting teams of dealers together to think as a group, to work as a group, to come up with answers and potentially win something is when we brought out that first belt we built, um you know, years ago, the SmackDown series belt that was all based around some of the work that you were so kind to help me with help the dealers with.
Collaborative Hands-on AI Teaching
00:10:04
Speaker
And think the way
00:10:07
Speaker
The way I want to talk about AI now is is that it it came out of that spirit of let's do something collaboratively and interact and from an interactive standpoint so that we could all learn as we go. Because i will never and will never be the the person standing up in front of the room saying, I know more than you. i I'm passionate about this stuff, and I try to carve up time in my day to learn it.
00:10:30
Speaker
But as far as the AI, the way I'm approaching it and the way I'm trying to help others learn it comes from, i think, a lot of years of not just going out speaking, but going out and challenging myself to to build content, build interactivity inside these sessions to make it truly sticky.
00:10:50
Speaker
Yeah. That's great. And I love... I don't know. I don't know if that i don't know sorry i don't know if that answered that at all. No, I did. was like halfway through that answer. You're fine. I don't even know what the hell I'm talking about. No, yeah. It was sort of... It was sort of born out of, you know, kind of getting more sort tactile and more tangible in terms of like the way that you approach the education, right? You had the family feud. wasn't just... You're not just standing in front of a people on a stage with a slide deck going...
00:11:16
Speaker
you know, here, like use these tools, right? You're actually, I like that there's the practical application like workshopping it. Cause I don't think you can just, I don't think you could, I don't think anyone would suggest it, but you can't teach AI just like from a slide deck. You can't just be like, well, here are tools. Here's what you do. I think you need to get your hands on it, right? You need to get, you need to get the your hands dirty and and really like practically AI the tools based on some guidance from someone who has really dedicated a lot of time towards this educational aspect of it.
00:11:46
Speaker
um
Creative Collaboration with AI
00:11:47
Speaker
So I love that idea of workshop. workshopping it. And so we'll talk about it in a few minutes. We have that kind of a workshop coming up at Digital Dealer. But before we even get into that, I know it's hard to narrow things down because like i mean I've dabbled in MidJourney, ChatGPT, Jasper. I've used a tool for that leverages AI for creating content briefs. I mean, they're tools that I don't even know about, right? I'm i'm probably woefully behind the curve of of this all. And I saw a post the other day on social media from you and I believe you had created like a dumpster fire image or garbage can fire image.
00:12:21
Speaker
And Sean Raines had turned it, it used a platform to turn it into a video, which was really bad. um So what what I did was I, and ironically, I don't use AI to generate a lot of images.
00:12:34
Speaker
I'm still kind of old school. Like I like taking, um i like taking a lot of different pieces and, assets and things from stock libraries and my own photography and illustrative work, um different graphics. And I like to still Frankenstein's things together to make look and feel. um i don't yeah like I don't use a ton of it, but i because I know that what I want to get out of the tool, um i really wanted to look and feel a certain way.
AI in Content Creation
00:13:04
Speaker
So that that dumpster fire was actually quite a bit of prompting to get like photo a photo realistic picture of that fire.
00:13:10
Speaker
But that is kind of the wonderful thing about collaborative efforts with this is Sean and I send back a lot of things like, hey, have you seen this tool? Did you see this tutorial? And all that was on on at the end of last week was,
00:13:25
Speaker
Here's some stuff we put together based on learning we got from our peers, from people like Rory Flynn, from people like Sean. So when I sent him this picture, the the experiment was he was doing stuff in mid-journey, then into runway. So a static image in mid-journey that he generated, he could go then animate the video in runway. I think it's runway.
00:13:44
Speaker
So I did the same for um photographic prompting in Dolly to see if I could get the same kind of clarity that you can do these really deep prompts in Mid Journey and get like, you know Vogue level magazine pictures if you really work it.
00:13:59
Speaker
That's a good probably 45 minutes of real prompting, like photo studio prompting. Um, so, you know, when we, when we were doing this, I got it to a place where i was like, let's, let's see what we can do with it.
00:14:10
Speaker
Sean turned it into that motion graphic. And, you know, ironically enough that when we actually, when i did slap it onto a client's creative that for a Saturday post, man, the thing blew up just because no pun intended, but, um,
00:14:24
Speaker
Because the graphic was provocative, but the movement was really cool. you know It was really aggressive. So just collaborating on things like that, I think, is where we learn the most with AI right now. I think the grassroots bra roots aspect of it is the spirit of sharing knowledge, sending people links, sending them newsletters you may be subscribing to because the people I kind of talk to and share things with, that's what we do a lot of like, oh, follow this newsletter. Here's someone on LinkedIn who's, you know, you know got a podcast building cool things.
00:14:59
Speaker
sharing sharing products and and platforms. it's It's kind of a fun time with it right now because honestly, like nobody's in X. Like there, yes, there are experts on it There's people I know that have gone to school, like to places like MIT to do their, you know,
00:15:16
Speaker
their masters in in this kind of stuff and in AI comp side. But for most of us who are marketers and creatives and and copywriters and admin and project managers, like it's still ground zero. Like
AI Tools and Marketing Efficiency
00:15:27
Speaker
when you look at the surveys of people and how they feel, how far along they are, the majority of people still feel like they're still green pea, like, you know, they're still kind of in that novice level.
00:15:36
Speaker
And when you actually start working through it, i think a lot of us are. So the more we can just sort of work and collaborate, share things, um rather than, get into the trope of, I think most industries get in trouble is, is like, there's all this chatter of like, here's all this AI stuff we have to learn. We have to know about it because it's coming faster than we, than we know, but the vendors on our, like um in our vertical and the vendors and other vertical, they don't actually spend a lot of time actually telling you,
00:16:04
Speaker
um how to use it to better yourselves outside of telling you how to use their stuff to better yourself. Right. Like, so, you know, there's just a lot of AI tools out there and are in the automotive industry and that's fantastic.
00:16:17
Speaker
But um I just noticed that a lot of those people still aren't actually taking the time to show people things like truly teach people stuff. So, you know, I i don't swim in the, I don't swim in the vendor lane anymore. um You know, i'm I'm not really working at a dealer level. So I've got this perfect agnostic perch, know,
00:16:34
Speaker
to kind of come in and build these workshops now to go, we're all just going to screw around together with this stuff. And, but I'm going to bring in my agency acumen and my strategic acumen, and I'm going to, I'm going to help show you how to kind of package it all together.
00:16:48
Speaker
But what you create with it in, in the workshops I'm doing is really kind of up to the individuals and the teams. Again, I'm, Just rambling on here, dude. Like, just stop me. No, you are not rambling. Kill my mind. I want this. I'm fucking just on a tear. Like, God it. I know. I want this. you know what you said What you said earlier but ya miller is a great segue. You talked about people on Ground Zero, right? The practitioners, the people are really...
00:17:15
Speaker
you know not from a 10,000 foot view, like overlooking things, but people were actually like, again, in the weeds, getting their hands dirty. That's who I want to, that's who i want us to be talking to here today. And so,
00:17:26
Speaker
Knowing that, knowing i want to focus on practitioners, people, whether it's content marketers, you know small, you know single point three, three rooftop creative marketers, right three rooftop organization marketers, things like that.
00:17:40
Speaker
I know even like narrowing it in scope to that would still be kind of hard to kind of pull out one tool. But if there's like, if there's a starting point, like a launch point, for someone in marketing to start dabbling into AI, what type what tool do you think would be kind of a ah most effective sort of starting point and any sort of tips or insights on how they can start to use that tool, whether it's guidance on a prompt or you know any sort of features you wanna highlight? Like where would you tell someone to kind of start to really sink their teeth into just kind of AI in general, whether it's creative or SEO or technical, whatever it might be, what's a great launching point?
00:18:19
Speaker
i think I think most would agree that, you know, get into a get into like a Gemini or a ChatGPT, right? get it get it into a Get into a base LLM, like a large learning model, and and use a ChatGPT, especially like if you're a marketer, if you're a creative, like open up ChatGPT.
00:18:42
Speaker
pay the 20 bucks a month and get yourself a pro account because then you're getting yourself enough firepower to just, you know, help me write this email, help me write a copy deck for an ebook, help me do research. Like there's enough things as a marketer that if you go,
00:18:57
Speaker
i was I said to some marketers, some young marketers the other day is always keep a paper list beside you of all the things you're asked to do.
Advanced AI Automation for Marketers
00:19:06
Speaker
And then ask that, you know, I just asked chat GPT like to do that.
00:19:10
Speaker
What I and why I say that and it's kind of the it's kind of an easy answer. But I think if you start to understand and use a tool like that to finesse prompting.
00:19:20
Speaker
and being as simple as possible while being as detailed as possible. Because um what I always say to people is it's not, it's never just one line of prompt. Like I think that the best prompts tend to be over 450, 500 words by the time you're done talking to your prompt, right?
00:19:37
Speaker
Or even out of the box, sometimes I used to write these really long prompts and um Still do depending on what I'm working on but chat GPT or or like one of those just base AI engines that just kick out a lot of different things. And, you know, they've got like chat GPT's got Dolly kicked in. So you can you can screw around with images there.
00:19:58
Speaker
You can you can use like a chat GPT to. um analyze analytic work, right? So if you're pulling things out of your Google AdWords and you're pulling things out of different dashboards, you can CSV, all of that stuff and throw it at something like a chat GPT and have it assess report on, you know, analyze, do whatever you want with that. So as a marketer goes out of the gate, that would be the one thing I would start to play with and learn how to do Because then you can evolve to building GPTs inside and and without kind of melting heads.
00:20:32
Speaker
But you can build these standing bots that have all of the pre-prompt work that you'd want to do over and over again. So in theory, as if up here in Canada, if I had to write a an email once a month to French and English readers based on just...
00:20:48
Speaker
industry news, I would build this bot to go here. Like I would take that prompt. Basically, you're just taking a prompt and you're permanently putting it inside an engine that you go make a new email, right? That's your prompt. And then it goes out and does its work. So a GPT could be something where,
00:21:04
Speaker
You load in a knowledge base full of Canadian automotive news sources. And then every month when you prompt it it goes out to look at the most recent, most engaged news on those channels and then writes you your email to your clients.
00:21:19
Speaker
in French and English. So that's just the thing. But the bot itself, you build it to go, um do you do you need your email for this month? And you can put in yes, and it doesn't, right? Because all the work has been done.
00:21:31
Speaker
So if you're if you're a marketer and you're still like, shit, I've got to get caught up, get into something like ChatGPT. It's a low cost of engagement to get in. think even they're or weird old versions, somewhat free. So you can screw around with a lot of tools. And the beautiful thing is, is like in that environment, you can't mess anything up.
00:21:52
Speaker
Like you can throw all kinds of crap at it, but it's not it's not going to like overwrite all your image files on your creative cloud, you know, Adobe creative cloud or in your Canva or whatever. Or it's not going to it's not going to rewrite any content that you've got saved in your Google Drive, right? Like this is just like it's pure sandbox.
AI in Creative Processes
00:22:09
Speaker
Like it's pure play in there. So I would get on something like ChatGPT because of all the different nuances it can do for, I think, three hours.
00:22:18
Speaker
um And then just go out and and seek out tutorials, watch videos, read read newsletters, yeah like watch people's podcasts where they're showing the work. Because, man, there's just the one thing that's coming out is like you can't throw a rock without hitting like another AI tutorial if you look if you're looking the right spots.
00:22:36
Speaker
But look outside the industry. Don't look inside automotive because we we don't do a good enough job of it. Yeah, i tell I often tell people, look outside of automotive for a lot of different every strategic and tactical things ah to apply to automotive. I like that.
00:22:50
Speaker
As I've told people, as I've practiced with ChatGPT, I treat it sort of like poetry. and take out I take out all the unnecessary verbiage and get down without losing the message. What is like sort of the core the core of it that I'm trying to get, the output that I'm trying to get?
00:23:05
Speaker
Sure, and the the biggest thing to remember, and the one thing I will say, hey that i that I parrot all the time is AI does a lot of quick work for you. You can really throw a lot at it to get a lot of your heavy lifting done in a short amount of time.
00:23:22
Speaker
And what's really lovely about that is it actually opens up more of your time to go in and then finesse that work. Because if you're going go in and lazy, like what I call lazy prompting, if you're just going to write me an email, then you're going to get all the delves.
00:23:33
Speaker
You're going to get all the in the worlds of competitive this. You're going all these flowery words and you're going to get like a dumpster fire of emojis on the copy. Like all of that stuff. Like if you start to prompt better, you can start to actually train your, the AI tools to write the way you want to write.
00:23:50
Speaker
And so, because the the less you do, the more it will hallucinate and fill gap. Right. So what's really lovely about this, again, is do all the quick work with AI.
00:24:01
Speaker
Then you actually have more time in your day to go and like rewrite things. And maybe you're taking just chunks of things that produces and putting a couple of things in something you're already writing.
Content Strategy Development with AI
00:24:11
Speaker
Or, you know, it's just giving you there's a lot of documentation, too, for marketers that I don't think they even realize they can use this for.
00:24:19
Speaker
and maybe you know It depends on how much you document stuff. I document lot of things in my marketing and my strategy work. So I use it heavily for that. But yeah, you do it because of the short work and it gives you more time ah Yeah, I used it to help distill down a, we had this huge manual, like 100 pages of like an SEO manual. And I wanted to create guides out of it. And ah the guides would kind of be like the things that everyone would bookmark and refer to when they have questions about the process.
00:24:48
Speaker
But I wanted a manual still to kind of summarize it. So I used ChatGPT to help me write little snippets of the guides to kind of give that preview of what is the information you're going to pull from this particular guide? How can this help you? So ah it's definitely a... definitely found to be very helpful.
00:25:04
Speaker
I've morphed over to building things like GPTs or agents. I use a different platform where I build agents and we stuff these things full of all of our clients' intel, Every link, every PDF, every legacy thing, we connect it to their YouTube channel. So I've got bots that are just going out all the time and just studying clients so I can do longer planning, right? So part of, you know, to extend it is, like you said, with these documents is for marketers and for creatives, that the real goal, the real...
00:25:36
Speaker
gold
AI Hackathon Event Overview
00:25:37
Speaker
is using it to do this kind of work to map out an evergreen content you've already built or simplify documentation, um work on things where you can really be smart about like loading up, like if you're if you're really focused on content marketing and not just sort of hitting out, but really thinking about it like a quarter over quarter, like what are the story arcs that you're talking about?
00:26:01
Speaker
um or if you're treating yourself like a new service, it's just you can use these tools to really do that heavy, heavy load work too, right? Of of mapping how content should go out and where you where you should put it.
00:26:13
Speaker
And that's just a matter of like, you know, you can you can either keep working things like Zapier and connect them to things and, you know, directly push it. But I still think you need, you still need strategically, you know, people who are you know, looking at it strategically and critically, you know, as human beings and not just as... Absolutely.
00:26:32
Speaker
Yeah, well, we're going to pivot real quick. And I think that the the last thought too is like you said, I think so many people are focused on like client-facing deliverables and not what AI can do for yeah for internal things. But...
00:26:45
Speaker
Thinking thinking of workshops and and actually you know getting our hands on things, I'm excited about what I'm going to learn. ah We have Digital Dealer coming up, the Hackathon. kind of give us the give what's the What's the elevator pitch? What are people going get out of the Hackathon at Digital Dealer for anyone who listens in is going to come to Digital Dealer and should attend?
00:27:07
Speaker
what's What's the elevator pitch on this? um it It's simply, it's simply, the it's it's the It's the efforts of 10 plus years of me speaking at these events and trying to educate dealers. It it is it is sort of the perfect storm of of everything I've ever wanted to go to when I was at ah when i was at a session.
00:27:28
Speaker
What the hackathon is, is historically hackathons are places that you would send your teams of, you'd have a creative department at your agency or you'd have in-house development or whatever. And they would go away for two days, three days, for a weekend.
00:27:40
Speaker
That would be a hackathon where teams of people would be challenged to build something. They would plot out what they were doing. They would spend time building it. And then they would present it to everyone involved in the hackathon. This would all be judged on. And there would always be like these sweet cash prizes and different things.
00:27:55
Speaker
When I had my agency, my developers loved going to this. So we would always send them off to these hackathons to go spend weekends and and go build. The spirit of that, I crushed the first time we did it into like 90 minutes or something. Not even. We packed it into a very...
00:28:10
Speaker
Very, very small amount of time. But at Digital Dealer, for marketers and creatives who are are wanting to get more hands-on, deeper, see more products, collaborate with more people, this is a chance to get to Digital Dealer where we will have 10 teams.
00:28:30
Speaker
Each team will have seats for nine people, and that's it. if you're If you sign up ahead of time, we can talk about that later. But once you get in on your teams, I, as your hackathon lead, will come out at the start of this, and I will give you the deliverable that you are supposed to build and act on.
00:28:45
Speaker
Then the teams, as teams attend, they will all individually plot, produce, and present all of the work that I've asked them to prepare, but they are going to build that work, assemble it, and prepare it for presentation all using AI tools.
00:29:02
Speaker
So the table captains like yourself will all be armed with little things in their back pockets like here's a platform we're going to use to assemble the presentation. Here's something you can use to organize budgetary files, like whatever it is, because we're not just making pictures and writing crap. We're going to do
Hands-on Learning at Hackathon
00:29:18
Speaker
budgets and timelines and project management and all these different things that have to be a part of the final presentation.
00:29:24
Speaker
But the cool thing about this is is we've run this now. This is year two of doing the hackathons. And I think this is about number six or seven and total of of the number of them I've been running since a year before last or 2023.
00:29:37
Speaker
um We keep finding little nuances about them. And the thing the thing that i'm that's really sort of glowing up now for me is um The teams are spending more time getting the presentations together.
00:29:50
Speaker
Like they're learning really fast together, like that note but earlier about do all the fast work and then finesse it. The presentations are just as important as what you're learning. But this year at Digital Dealer, they've given us almost an entire afternoon.
00:30:04
Speaker
closed door, in a room workshop at this hackathon. So not only will you be building things as a team are presenting it, but there will be table captains that will be showing really deep dive image prompting, deep dive SEO prompting, deep dive analytical prompting. So different things that they're doing. So not only are you getting around some really good people like yourself, like the likes of Sean Raines and the likes of Aaron Richmond, like you're just getting in dealers like Jared Kilway and o Alexis Perkins.
00:30:34
Speaker
We've just got different different ways of looking at the tools and the way we're using these tools at every single table. So everyone's experience will be different. But what's the best part of it is it's just you get 10 strangers around a table that for three hours have to figure it out.
00:30:52
Speaker
And so there'll be different wrinkles and there'll be different nuances. But this is purely collaborative educational event. There really is nothing about this that is um under the mandate of any sort of sponsor. like there's no like you know We have a really heavy rule that vendors are allowed to participate too if there's seats for them. But if you're going to sit at a table, you're part of a team. You're not there to kind of like suitcase your like you're there You're there to be a part of a team and learn something. And we had vendors there too last year that were like, I didn't know I could do this with AI. I didn't know I could do that with AI.
00:31:26
Speaker
I had no idea this tool even existed. So all I want this to be is a really cool way for people to dig into something and truly get their hands dirty about it instead of just sitting in an audience listening to a bunch of, you know, predetermined sponsors telling you why AI is so cool, giving you a couple of things that kind of tee into their products like As creatives and marketers, you're out there doing things on behalf of your company or for your dealership or dealership groups.
00:31:55
Speaker
I want to give all those people the tools to just do the best work they can, either if you're a vendor marketing team, dealership marketing team, what have you. This is more
Encouraging AI Learning Participation
00:32:04
Speaker
for those people and and owners alike. like i I highly encourage decision makers to come to this too and learn shit because most of what I'm hearing out there now is companies have...
00:32:16
Speaker
all this onus on learning AI, and it's kind of up to one person in the company to learn as much as they can. And everyone just go to that person, right? Like, yo, you're our Salesforce evangelist. Go teach us everything about Salesforce. And then that person gets hit by a bus and you're back to square square one yeah So, you know, like, God forbid they get hit by a bus. No one wants that. But all I'm saying is, i think that we're at a point with these tools that there's so much out there They're so flexible for different levels of professional, you know, in your profession, the different level of where you're at.
00:32:51
Speaker
You can be C-suite right down to entry level intern and be using these tools for something. And they're super interesting. And the smart decision makers out there are trying to wrap their heads around. Like, don't don't be a don't be the old school, stick your head in the sand. I'm a busy CEO. I don't have time for this. Or I'm a busy you know director, group account director, whatever it is. I don't have time for this. I'll get my minions to do it.
00:33:12
Speaker
Like, you can do that, but those people will be doing your job. yeah No, I love it. I highly encourage everyone to attend it, not just because I'm one of the captains, but it is Tuesday, October 8th, starting at 1 p.m. in Boulevard 165. We'll kick off the AI Hackathon. Then it looks like yeah on Wednesday, October 9th, you're then going to share best practices and takeaways from the day before. From that.
00:33:38
Speaker
Yeah, it's it's it's mental. And um there's a lot of sessions at the show. There's a lot of great people speaking. So some people won't be at the... Some people won't be at the hackathon. There is a sign up and We've already seen, I was out of meeting today with Emerald. There's people already signing up for seats at the hackathon to reserve their seats. But there's, and we're only doing like 90 people in total at ours because there's other people speaking, other people doing things.
00:34:01
Speaker
So if you don't do the hackathon, um you're crazy if you don't, but if you don't do it, on the Wednesday, I'll get the captains back up. I'll get a couple people back up and we'll do takeaways from the afternoon on Tuesday.
00:34:16
Speaker
What's really surprising about that is I thought like, who wants to hear that? But I was in Vegas at ah at a... show that handled Amazon sellers that focuses on Amazon sellers, e-com people.
00:34:27
Speaker
And, um, I did the, I did the learning lab the second day, just to takeaways, brought some captains up. We had a full house, like, because people were in other sessions ago, I still want to take away. So I still had captains doing live prompting, um,
00:34:42
Speaker
ah examples, couple you know couple of takeaways, what they learned, what what happened, but it's not the full experience. like If people want to come to the learning lab, they'll get a snapshot of what it was like, maybe some takeaways, what to think about going forward. But if you truly, really want to get into this, come to the hackathon. Because also, part of the way we do the hackathon without revealing too much is There's a facet of the hackathon that stays connected before and after the event.
00:35:10
Speaker
And what the captains were saying from last year's event were there was a lot of people that stayed in touch based on how we connected everyone inside the event. And they kept sharing prompts and they kept sharing tools and they kept asking their captains months later, hey, what was that prompt that we did this
Brent's Dining Recommendations
00:35:25
Speaker
again? how did Because they were bringing that into their own teams. The goal of the hackathon is I want those people to leave and go, I have enough intel now to even do an and exercise like this in the walls of my own building.
00:35:37
Speaker
That truly is what I want them to go out and do because, you know, i we need more subject matter experts on this, like true subject matter experts, not just, you know, I'm going to come out and talk about ai And really, I just, I want you to come to my booth. Yes, I want people to go to vendors booths at Digital Dealer. I absolutely do.
00:35:56
Speaker
But I think we do a disservice to people if we're teasing in AI content and we're just going to show examples of what AI is doing and not helping people like physically use this shit, right? Because that's that's that's where falls down. So that's why. That's why you should go.
00:36:13
Speaker
The best sessions are the ones where you can actually truly go back and apply what you learn within the walls of your own of your own office. So I really appreciate that. Now, to be cognizant of of your time, Brent, and and the time here we have together, I do want to pivot to one just because more than you can chew, I'm like, you know what? I came up with the name because I want to tie I love food, right? I'm i'm Italian, Irish, and Orthodox. Yeah.
00:36:36
Speaker
I'm 247 pounds, so clearly I like to eat. ah Brent, tell me, i mean, you're a well-traveled guy, but whether it's your hometown or somewhere you've been, where's a place you really, like you you sat down, you had a meal and you went, damn, like this is a place I'm going to come back to.
AI Tool for Instructional Documentation
00:36:54
Speaker
um I'll give you two. I was going to give you, i was, I'm going to give you the first one I'll give you is for those that will go to NADA in the new year, right? Cause NADA is not that far out. It's going to be in New Orleans, which I was just there in June, ah hanging out and just watching music and eat. Like, that's all I, like I did. I just, I ate and I watched a ton of music.
00:37:13
Speaker
Um, and so, If you're going to NADA and you are brave enough to ride a trolley uptown to just outside of city park, I'm brave enough. It's the trolley is amazing.
00:37:25
Speaker
Streetcar is amazing. You can take a streetcar right up to this joint and just walk over to it. It's called Rosedale restaurant and it's like a breakfast joint. yeah I think it like does, it does dinners and stuff too, but it's this, it's, it's this old house. They've got this killer interior inside.
00:37:40
Speaker
And I had brunch there, which was dynamite. So for the native travelers, if you're going to start looking outside of the quarter to go eat, i will give you Rosedale restaurant for new Orleans. There's other places in new Orleans that I'm not telling any, I'll tell you secret. I'm not telling you on the podcast because I want to make sure I get my reservations in and none of them are in heads up. None of them are in the quarter.
00:38:02
Speaker
Like the best places to eat in new Orleans. A lot of them are in down near the convention center. They're not in that walking distance. Like, but you know, New Orleans is freakishly small and like places like Bywater the Garden District have these like joints that are just dynamite.
00:38:15
Speaker
But yeah, Rosedale restaurant in New Orleans for NADA. And if you do come to my city of Toronto, um I live like right in the middle of the city.
00:38:28
Speaker
But my favorite joint is just like, so I'm, I'm on Chinatown East and just around just North of Chinatown West up on college street is a restaurant called Dailo D-A-I dash L-O brothers on it.
00:38:44
Speaker
Dailo is probably my absolute favorite joint to eat at Asian fusion. And there then there's like, they've got their grandmother's recipes for certain dumplings and things and So it's just the servers are great.
00:38:58
Speaker
My partner and my daughter love the cocktails they make. But it's that Dialo is that place in Toronto that if you came into and the town, d like I wouldn't be bringing you there. um You know, there are people in the industry that have been in Toronto. Like that's where I've taken them eat.
00:39:13
Speaker
So if you're in Toronto, Dialo is definitely the place to eat and stay on restaurant. Awesome. All right. Appreciate Brent, thank you so much for carving out time. I know you're a busy guy. Thanks for your tips on chat GPT about prompting, um you know, using that as a launch point.
00:39:29
Speaker
ah Thanks for sharing information about the hackathon. I'm very excited for it. And of course your, your food traveling tips. I ah respect your travel pretty much all things that we talk about. So really appreciate you doing this today and look forward to seeing you in a digital dealer.
00:39:45
Speaker
Yeah. Digital dealer, please, again, Dane said, come to the hackathon. It will be well worth time spent. Can I give you one more tool to go check out? Absolutely. watch it feel those and For marketers, one of the things I got playing with, because I sent it to a client because they had to document different processes. So think about it this way. You're you're a marketing team. and You're the director of that marketing And you bring some, you're onboarding someone.
00:40:09
Speaker
So there's a lot of different tools that you may be using that maybe that intern or that that junior person has to get up to speed on. And sometimes it's just simple things where you're writing emails, right? Or maybe there's someone at the dealership or inside your building who needs just the walkthrough.
00:40:26
Speaker
Go we'll look at a tool called guide, G-U-I-D-D-E dot com. Free version allows you to take screen like screen videos. like So I could be in Canva just showing how to use the resize tool.
00:40:40
Speaker
So I got to resize a whole bunch of banners. I can screen capture that in guide. And then its AI will actually write a complete walkthrough. So you can share the link to the walkthrough with the person. And it'll put in, you don't even have to say a word.
00:40:55
Speaker
You can just click and it'll write it for you. So you don't have to narrate it You just have to do the exercise on screen and guide will start to write out that copy. But you can, if you pay paid version, you can knock out a PDF of it.
00:41:09
Speaker
So you could actually distribute that or keep a file, keep a Google Drive full of these onboarding docs of here's the day-to-day stuff we use all the time. So if you
Episode Conclusion and Next Invitation
00:41:19
Speaker
need a refresher on how to use it, we've used AI to build this library of like learning docs.
00:41:24
Speaker
So i I have nothing to do with them. It's just a newsletter I read. Awesome. Here's a cool new tool. So guide is one of those things. So if you are organizing your your work, your playbooks, like you said, like all the things you need to organize on behalf of your team, guides are really cool tool to go check out.
00:41:40
Speaker
And the free tool anybody can get into right now Awesome. bunker All right. and That's the best. Go find stuff and muck around. and There we go. muck Muck around. I like it. ah Brent, as always, thanks again. And everyone, thanks for listening in. And I'll see you for the next More You Can Chew.
00:41:56
Speaker
Thanks, Dean.