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00:00:01
43–Gini Dietrich: Building Trust and Growing with the PESO Model
3 Plays4 minutes ago
In this episode of The Unfolding Thought Podcast, Eric Pratum sits down with Gini Dietrich, founder of Spin Sucks and creator of the PESO Model©—a strategic framework for aligning paid, earned, shared, and owned media to build reputation and deliver business results.
Gini shares lessons from her work advising brands, training communicators, and building a thriving media and education company. She explains how trust is built and broken in communications, what it takes to sustain content over time, and why PR needs a seat at the executive table. We also talk about the mindset behind showing up publicly and consistently, even when it’s hard or slow.
Gini’s insights are practical and refreshingly grounded. This episode is a valuable listen for anyone responsible for messaging, marketing, or media strategy.
Topics Explored:
- What is the PESO Model—and how does it create business results?
- Why communicators must learn to speak the language of the C-suite
- The long-game of building thought leadership and trust
- The Spin Sucks origin story and lessons from building community
- Challenges and opportunities in earned media today
- How to know what’s actually working in communications
- Balancing transparency, authority, and discipline in public content
Links:
- Gini Dietrich, Spin Sucks, and the PESO Model: https://spinsucks.com
For more episodes, visit: https://unfoldingthought.com
Join the conversation by emailing Eric at: eric@inboundandagile.com
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Transcript
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to the Unfolding Thought Podcast. My name is Eric Pradham. Today, I'm talking with Jenny Dietrich, founder of Spin Sucks and the creator of the Peso Model, a framework for integrating paid, earned, shared, and owned media in a strategic, scalable way.
00:00:19
Speaker
Jenny has worked across communications, PR, and marketing for decades, and her approach has shaped how many organizations, large and small, think about trust, influence, and reputation today.
00:00:34
Speaker
In our conversation, Ginny and I talk about how to build a reputation you can stand on, how communications teams can drive measurable outcomes, and why the PESO model is so much more than just media coverage.
00:00:50
Speaker
We get into practical applications, the discipline of content creation, and how Ginny has built community and influence around an honest, no BS approach.
00:01:03
Speaker
If you've ever struggled with the gap between what marketing says and what actually moves the needle, I hope this conversation will provide you with some clear things to take action on.
00:01:14
Speaker
And now I bring you Ginny Dietrich. Ginny, thank you for joining me. It's nice to see you again after so long. Would do you mind telling me a little about yourself? It's so good to see you too. We were just talking pre-recording about how long it's been. It's been a while. It's very nice to see you too.
00:01:31
Speaker
um And yes, I'm Jenny Dietrich. um I run an organization called Spin Sucks, which actually started as a blog for my agency, which at the time was Armit Dietrich.
00:01:41
Speaker
um The blog then became a book and then became a community and has become its own media property where we now do licensing, training, and implementation of the PESO model.
00:01:53
Speaker
Tell me about the Peso model. Sure. It's ah for those that don't know, it's an acronym that start stands for paid, earned and shared and owned media. And, you know, it came about because in my agency, we were trying we did very traditional PR. We did media relations, events, reputation management, crisis kinds of stuff.
00:02:14
Speaker
And we were in a ah spot where we were doing really well with media relations. I mean, we were getting like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and the L.A. Times. we were on the cover of both Wall Street Journal and the L.A. Times at once.
00:02:27
Speaker
And I mean, for clients. And it was we were doing a really good job from a PR perspective. Um, but when you do that, you have some highs and lows, right? Like you're, if there's an event or there's big news or a new product launch or a new campaign or something that, you have lots of media hits.
00:02:45
Speaker
And then when nothing else, nothing's going on, you have the lull. And during the lull, of course, you're still working, you're still building relationships with journalists, you're staying top of mind, all those kinds of things. But... I learned and that clients don't like to pay for the lulls. They don't like to pay for the things that you have to do to make sure that you can get the highs.
00:03:02
Speaker
And this all happened at the same time as like, Twitter launching, LinkedIn launching, Facebook becoming available to um businesses. Inbound marketing was becoming a thing. v Blogging was becoming a thing. And so we were looking at it to kind of understand, are these things that we can incorporate into our business, into the things that we do for clients, so that we have more consistent output and more but consistent results?
00:03:29
Speaker
And so we were doing all of this stuff. And when I wrote Spinsucks, the book, I talked about this. I talked about how we were taking all of that. And my publisher, after the first draft, came back and said, this process that you're talking about here is really interesting. What do you call it? And I was like,
00:03:47
Speaker
I don't know. And she's like, well, let's give it a name. So we went back and forth because, and we'll probably talk about this later, but I believe that if you're going to do the media types in order, it would be OSEP or OESP.
00:04:01
Speaker
But you can see that I have to actually think about that, right? And so she said, well, can we do peso? I think that makes more sense. It's easier to remember. Number one rule of branding, all those kinds of things. And I was like, well,
00:04:12
Speaker
There's a currency called that. Can we do it? And so we went through the whole copyright thing to include it in the book and they and we discovered that we could call it that. And then she came back and she's like, great. Now, can you create a graphic to go with it? And I was like, oh, my word, can we just write the stupid book? ah OK, so we created a graphic.
00:04:28
Speaker
And it's funny to look at the very first graphic that was published in the book compared to today, because you can tell we rushed it. It was just like ah we had to get something in the book and just like, right.
00:04:39
Speaker
um And it's it's evolved significantly in the last 11 years. But that's how it sort of came to iteration is we were trying to figure out how to fill those valleys so that we had more consistent results for clients and introducing paid, owned and shared media into those that those kinds of activities. so So did you say that now your primary focus is training people in peso rather than running PR or any other forms of marketing?
00:05:11
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, the business is completely flipped. I'd say it started during the pandemic because we found, you know, as as you well know, that everybody was trying to figure out how how to stay afloat and how to, you know, completely shift their businesses to new models.
00:05:28
Speaker
And so it started to shift a little bit where we were doing more training on the framework. um And then literally last year, which was 10 years, so it it literally took 10 years for overnight success, it exploded. And now we're we're doing licensing, training, and implementation inside Fortune 10 companies. I mean, it just, overnight.
00:05:52
Speaker
Do you, you know, I remember when i was involved with Microsoft at a fairly high level, but from the outside, we were working on social media for Windows, Bing, Office, Xbox, etc. This was pre-2010. Yeah. Yeah.
00:06:12
Speaker
yeah Around that time, social media was still so new in so many ways. And yeah I would argue that social media remained new in some sense through maybe 2015 or something, you know, depending on how you want to cut things. Yeah.
00:06:27
Speaker
It was still a long time. And so at that time, There are plenty of people who are arguing that you can't really do social media well, quote unquote, unless you're inside an organization.
00:06:42
Speaker
And ah kind of use that as a, a, an example, let's say, because you are, you not acting as your client's agent, but it sounds to me like for your clients, and I'm guessing some or maybe plenty of your clients are freelancers, agency people, whatever, but whether that's a correct assumption or not, you're also, I suspect, training the marketers within the brands
00:07:15
Speaker
And so do you have a perspective about certain types of marketing or communications that are better handled or certain roles or channels inside an organization versus being the potential for someone on the outside to work in those areas?
00:07:35
Speaker
It depends. um All of the clients that we have on the brand side have agencies. And so we're not we're not a threat to them. We're not doing the work that they do.
00:07:48
Speaker
We're teaching the marketers the the framework. And it's very scientific. So there's a very scientific way that you go through it um and understand it and learn it and and implement it um So the marketers, and in in many cases, you know, there's 2000 marketers, so it's not a small thing. But what we're finding is that as a communicator by trade, i wanted comms people to own this. And we're finding that that's not the case at all, that the marketers are are owning it. And in fact, for every one of our clients, we don't work with the comms teams at all.
00:08:20
Speaker
And it's disappointing for me and a couple of people on my leadership team as well, because we all have comms expertise, but um we're finding that the marketers are the ones that are are using it.
00:08:31
Speaker
And then what they're doing is they're, when they do briefs for their agencies, they're saying, okay, here are the things that you need to be thinking about from a Pace and Model perspective. So ad agency, you need to be doing this, this, and this. Content, you need to do this. Social, you need to this.
00:08:44
Speaker
So they're still bringing their agencies in to do the work, but they're directing and managing agencies differently because of it. Given the way that you described the PESO model and then, you know, what you just said, I appreciated actually the answer that you gave because the description ah sounded to me of the PESO model like we're looking more for consistency and or sustainability in our marketing and communications.
00:09:17
Speaker
And that to me suggested strategy in some respects. And I don't even know at the moment that strategy is necessarily the right word as much as to say, when I go to my agency to say, I'm looking for these things in the grander scheme, in the bigger picture.
00:09:40
Speaker
And so yes, a campaign or whatever it is will have certain marks that it needs to hit or goals that it needs to fulfill upon. But hopefully any of the email or the PR or whatever it is that we do will also serve mission, vision, values, sorts of things.
00:09:59
Speaker
And so it's not just direct response, for example. Right. Yeah, so consistency, sustainability are definitely two. So we find that in most organizations, tactic exactly what you're saying, tactics run parallel in parallel with one another and they're not integrated. And one of the things the Pace on Model Framework teaches you is how to integrate that.
00:10:21
Speaker
So yeah, we they get the marketers get to the point where they expect their agencies to work together, which is not an easy undertaking. Like we have, we've helped some of our clients build internal integrated agency teams that then that brings together team leads from each of the agencies to work together.
00:10:41
Speaker
And you can imagine that there's some, you know, fiefdom protection and things like that. So it is a bit of, breaking down silos and it's a bit of change management.
00:10:52
Speaker
um But what we find is that because most organizations run those those tactics in parallel, something like this will happen. So there's a great example of ah Samsung a couple of years ago did a Super Bowl ad.
00:11:07
Speaker
And people were like, this is fantastic. This phone looks amazing. And so the ad did its job, right? Like it got it created visibility. It created interest. People went to the website and the phone could not be found found on the website.
00:11:21
Speaker
So then they went to social and the phone couldn't be found on social. There was no integration. So the ad agency and the paid media team internally did a really good job. They did what they were supposed to do.
00:11:33
Speaker
But they didn't talk to anybody else. So they there they didn't know the ad was running. So it didn't get on the website. It wasn't talked about in social. There was no content. There was no media relations. And so it fell flat because of that. And and it's you you would think, oh, well that doesn't happen. It happens all the time.
00:11:52
Speaker
All the time. And so that's what we're one of the things that we do is we really go in and we so we kind of integrate ourselves with the teams. And we're like, everyone needs to talk together. Yeah, i I mean, even just thinking of something like I've done a lot of, not in recent years, but in the past, a lot of conversion rate optimization. And when you optimize a landing page, you know, every little thing that's not driving towards a conversion more than likely is distracting from it.
00:12:24
Speaker
And yeah so if my goal is only to generate a lead or a donation or whatever it is, adding that phone number where potentially there's no call tracking metrics or something right just distracts from my goals.
00:12:43
Speaker
And yet, as far as the organization is concerned, they probably don't care where the lead or the donation comes from. Yeah, you're you're absolutely right. And i think I think they're getting to the point of caring. And I think we're we're beginning to enter an era of, you know, what we what we've found in the last few years, i would say in the last five, is that much of the work was activity-based. And that's what they were reporting up, is we did this and we did this and we did this. and we just We had a landing page and, you know, like all of this stuff.
00:13:19
Speaker
And executives were OK with that. Well, now we're entering an era where they're like, well, wait a second. I want all of these things individually to convert. So how are you doing that? And for God's sakes, if you're going to run a Super Bowl ad and we're going to spend that much money, that hand better be talking to the other hand so that everything else is optimized to be able to sell. Because if the Super Bowl ad does what it's supposed to do, which it did, but they can't buy it, but that's a huge problem, right? And I think we're we're beginning to enter that era.
00:13:49
Speaker
And I think AI is to... is to Not necessarily blame, but I think AI is the cause of that where execs are going, now you have an opportunity to really have AI help you understand the data and make sure that it that all of this stuff is doing what you need it to do. Mm-hmm.
00:14:06
Speaker
That's interesting. I suspect that it will be valuable to come back around to AI. I wanted to ask you, though, you mentioned your book.
00:14:19
Speaker
I think you've written two books, haven't you? have. Yes. So the second book was Marketing in the Round, wasn't it? Yeah. Well, it was the first. It was Finsex was the second. But yeah, publishing wise, yeah.
00:14:29
Speaker
In marketing in the round, I believe I recall that you pushed pretty hard against organizational silos. And it sounds to me... Look you.
00:14:41
Speaker
I'm impressed. Thank you. I read a lot of books and a lot of them are audio, but I take notes. I love it. I love still have notes. That's amazing. your book.
00:14:52
Speaker
That's amazing. I think that... Some of what you're saying here talks to the value of breaking down organizational silos.
00:15:03
Speaker
And, you know, we're always going to have roles and responsibilities and so on, but... I guess what has been your experience the more that you've shifted towards training, you know, big and small businesses?
00:15:19
Speaker
Are you seeing that either the peso model is helping or that there cultural shifts that are breaking down silos? Or do you think that remains as much of a challenge as maybe it was 10 or 15 years ago?
00:15:35
Speaker
I think it's actually more of a challenge now than it was Back then. And, you know, when when i I co-authored Marketing in the Round and when Jeff and I wrote it, i think we were both really naive on what that meant. I mean, yes, yeah organizations should not have silos. But it if you go back and read it now, you're like, especially with another 13 years of experience, you're kind of like, oh.
00:15:57
Speaker
Yeah, I can see, but that's probably not the right way to do it. um You know, experience is wisdom, of course. But I think what we find is that when things are crazy externally, as the world is feels like it's on fire right now and it's chaotic, that people tend to kind of get paranoid and hold on to things more versus collaborating.
00:16:24
Speaker
So I actually think the organizational silos are worse today than they were back then. um But we find that two things have to happen. The first is there has to be a dedication from the top to implementing something like this because it is change management. You are requiring that teams talk to one another, that the agencies talk to one another. So that has to come from the top.
00:16:48
Speaker
But there also has to be a massive buy-in from the middle because they're the ones doing the work, right? And if you don't have buy-in from them, you can talk with the C-suite until you're blue in the face about how this needs to happen and what needs to happen. And you can put them through trading.
00:17:04
Speaker
But three months from now, they're not going to remember any of that. And they're going to go back to doing what they've always done, what they've already always been successful doing, no matter what the C-suite's saying. So we find that it's really important to get buy-in from the top to make sure that it's sort of an edict, but then work really well with with the middle, with the people who are doing the work, to ensure that it's not just a three-month thing, that it actually becomes embedded in their workflows and that it's the first thing that they think about. So that that's hard work. It's not an overnight thing, right? It's probably a three- to five-year thing, not a six-month thing.
00:17:42
Speaker
What is or has been your experience with trying to make sure that there's an endorsement from the top and that the middle is bought in? You know, my guess would be that some of this, you know, ah adopting the PESO model and actually executing upon it or or taking that ethos in some places it's successful and in other places it's not. But I suspect you have also...
00:18:09
Speaker
found that you have trained an organization well and one or 50 of their people really get it. But then a year or two later, it didn't go anywhere. So you you said you work really hard on some of these things, which I imagine has that that kind of thought process or focus has built over time. But are you having to integrate some sort of like change management or alignment work into the training that you're doing?
00:18:40
Speaker
Yeah, and I think we sort of fell into that on accident. And as as I was looking at the work that my team was doing with some of our clients, I realized that that was a big gap.
00:18:51
Speaker
And so I made a couple of really big hires this year to help us with that. um One strategy person who's really good at the change management piece and then a learning person who can take what work're we've done and almost scale it differently so that it's effective with adult learners.
00:19:10
Speaker
um You know, up until that point, up until hiring her, it was very much like live training. it was recorded videos. It was that kind of stuff. And what she's helping us do now is actually embedding the work into the workflows that exist and Versus act asking them to spend an hour or two on additional training or professional development every week.
00:19:32
Speaker
And that's been a huge shift. I mean, like the way that she thinks about that has been huge. So I think it's a little bit of change management and it's a little bit of of sort of shifting the way that you are working to help organizations understand it so that, again, it's not, to your point, it's not 50 people who get it and a year later it's not it's not being implemented anymore, but it's actually becoming part of their process.
00:19:58
Speaker
So for one client, we've included it in how they do their annual planning. And we've included it in how they do their quarterly assessments. So they have an actual checklist that they have to go through to say, have we done this? Have we done this?
00:20:12
Speaker
And if not, how are we going to implement these things? And that's how they're graded on now. So it's taken a while to get there. But, you know, embedding it into those workflows, yeah I think will be far more effective.
00:20:27
Speaker
that's interesting and for what it's worth you know i am working on a project right now where a client has they have a presenting problem you know they want to produce these kinds of documents better faster they want to produce twice as many with the same number of staff or yeah you know things of that nature and So their identified prescription was AI.
00:20:58
Speaker
You know, can we use AI to do these things better, faster, more scalably and so on. And I've said to them numerous times that I really don't think the thing that we built for them, this AI tool essentially, is the thing that they're going to need in six or 12 months or the thing that they will be getting a lot of value out of in six or 12 months. I think that the ultimate outcome or the benefit that they're going to get from this project is
00:21:30
Speaker
is that some of their people now have an actual use case with AI. You know, think back to the early days of Twitter or something. You would go and talk to your friends and say, Twitter's really cool.
00:21:44
Speaker
And they'd say, I've heard of it on CNN or whatever, but I just don't know why I would use it. Yep. And we have a similar thing, not just our parents, but in the workplace, I've heard of AI, but I don't know why I would use it.
00:21:59
Speaker
And so have, again, said to them explicitly, I feel like giving them a specific use case and not making it painful just lowers the barrier to entry for many of these people. And what you'll likely find in six or 12 months is that they started using it in the one area where we made it easy.
00:22:22
Speaker
And then some people will try, well, what about the next thing? What about the next use case? so so on That's right. Such that in 12 months, hopefully you have a handful of people who will actually use AI, but outside of this narrow initial scope. And it kind of sounds to me like there are some similar aspects. like, let's just embed this right into what you already do so that it's not an appendage or an add-on.
00:22:48
Speaker
That's right. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And, you know, you're telling the story and I'm thinking back to the early days of social media. And we had one client who was like who wanted to figure out how to use social internally for the business, but do it from a comms perspective. I think customer service was using it ah already a little bit.
00:23:07
Speaker
But how are how could they do it from communications perspective? And we were having a really hard time getting adoption. And I remember being in the chief communicator's office in San Diego and i was sitting in his in his office and you he was like, well, how how do you think we could do this? And he and I concocted this idea that we would create almost a you working group and we asked for volunteers. But we didn't ask for volunteers just from the comms department. We asked for volunteers across the company to be part of this working group. And we got about 10 people involved.
00:23:37
Speaker
involved. And then we we gave them responsibility for one aspect of social media. And what happened was as early adopters, their peers started to go, oh well, that's interesting. like Tell me more about that. And how are you doing that?
00:23:53
Speaker
And so you had this core group of people that started with it and became really successful. And then were allotted in company meetings and in town halls and things like that. So they were getting recognition and their peers got a little jealous and wanted the same kind of recognition. And then they all started to get involved. So it became and that actually happened pretty fast um using that sort of ad hoc or beta group of people that then expanded probably within six months, six to nine months, I would say.
00:24:18
Speaker
I, in recent years, have worked a lot with futurists and futurists, that sort of academic study of it rather than the tech utopians, you know. yeah They study our relationship with the future, which we all have a relationship with the future because if you drop that drink there that you just had, then you have an idea of what's going to happen in the next split second, right? You also have...
00:24:43
Speaker
visions of the future, ah what it's going to be like yeah this summer with your children and or where you would like your business to go in a year and so on. and And futurology or future studies, futurism is on the academic side of things and coming out of the Rand Corporation and so on, the study of our relationship with the future.
00:25:08
Speaker
And I share all of that because There is an idea that runs through a lot of philosophy and religious texts and many other things that you have to have an inspiring vision of the future in order for people to gather around a shared purpose.
00:25:30
Speaker
And it sounds to me like that's a bit of what is accomplished when I look over at my colleagues and I'm able to think.
00:25:42
Speaker
You know, that could be me or here's a place that we might go rather than. Yeah. You know, you have like a carrot and a stick sort of thing sometimes. Right. Yeah. Rather than the stick where you're just afraid of what might happen. You're not going to adopt AI. You're not going to adopt social media if you're just afraid that you might not hit your numbers this year.
00:26:04
Speaker
I've never thought about it from that perspective, but you're absolutely right. Fascinating. Huh. I'm writing this down. You got my wheels turning now. Well, thank you.
00:26:15
Speaker
You know, and this ah this alludes to, I think, a little bit of, I think your phrasing was something like, it feels like the world is on fire right now. And I wanted to i wanted to ask you about that essentially even coming into this conversation. So now is a time of great change. Of course, we can always look back into the past and say there was a lot changing.
00:26:43
Speaker
We're living the change right now. right So big or small in the Quran scheme thinks it sure feels big right now. And in times of great change, in particular, I think you said you're working with some Fortune 10s.
00:26:57
Speaker
They're probably being impacted by economic uncertainty or tariffs. Executive orders. Yep. Exactly. And, you know, just six or eight years ago, or even during the pandemic, you know, they were being hit by social change and by the pandemic and labor shortages and so on.
00:27:21
Speaker
And, but today, you know, when we have very clear economic impacts ah because of executive orders and tariffs and so on, this is a time when a lot of organizations cut back on marketing and communications.
00:27:40
Speaker
Now, i I suspect that you and i would say some version of now's the time to invest. Sure. But no one does. Yeah. Exactly.
00:27:51
Speaker
so You know, what are you telling people, whether it's through your training or just generally, I guess, well what are you telling people about marketing and communications given today's environment?
00:28:05
Speaker
I think it's the answer to that is twofold, because the organizations that are more sophisticated, you know, the organizations that have 2,500 marketers, they're more sophisticated, obviously, and they've invested in marketing and communications. Right. So they understand that if they stop marketing, then the business, that the pipeline dries up.
00:28:28
Speaker
So I think it's it's a different conversation there than it is with like a B2B manufacturing organization or a commoditized business that their business is drying up, their pipeline is drying up, and they just can't afford it. And to your point, they people make money, people make emotional decisions about money versus logical ones. So we can say until we're blue in the face that if you stop marketing, your pipeline is going to dry up.
00:28:55
Speaker
And they may know that logically, but they're also looking at their P&L and l and there's it's an e marketing and communications is easy. It's an expensive thing to just take right off, right, and get and get rid of it.
00:29:07
Speaker
We're also finding that many, most agencies are struggling right now um because of all of this. And their clients are being affected by tariffs and executive orders and all the things, right?
00:29:20
Speaker
So I actually have some content that I'm producing or creating right now on the topic that I'll publish in a few weeks. But it's really... Although now is not the time to reap the rewards of a tree that you planted because you had to have planted the tree 10 years ago, right?
00:29:38
Speaker
If you didn't plant that tree 10 years ago, if you haven't been marketing for 10 years and maybe you stopped during the pandemic, so you've been only marketing for two or three, right? the next best time to plant your trees now.
00:29:50
Speaker
So while it's painful and revenue may be down and all of those things, really think about how you're going to plant that tree so that in 10 years, you're ready for what's next.
00:30:01
Speaker
Because I think we have all lived through all of the experiences that It's cyclical and it's it used to happen every decade. Now it's happening every couple of years.
00:30:12
Speaker
So how are you going to be prepared for two years from now, four years from now, and 10 years from now? And it's to plant that tree now. So but I say that to agency owners. I say that to clients that are, you know, a little less sophisticated in their marketing efforts.
00:30:26
Speaker
Whether or not it resonates But I think that people can look back and go, yeah, you're right. If I had planted that tree 10 years ago, I'd be bearing the fruit now. And i could wait I could weather this storm a lot more differently. So that's my my advice always is let's get that tree planted now so that, you know, when when we have another crisis two years from now, you're ready. Yeah.
00:30:47
Speaker
It sure sounds to me like you're hinting at the, was it in Good to Great where Jim Collins talks about the flywheel? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:30:59
Speaker
It kind of sounds to me like you're talking about something like that, you know, where you put in the effort and it pays back dividends. And when the market is difficult or there's change or whatever, that's the time when you can take energy out.
00:31:17
Speaker
That's right. but if that flywheel isn't spinning that's right is now the time that you really want to start putting in the effort while you already don't have the energy or the resources right and so i'm wondering you mentioned ai and i did want to make sure that we spend at least a little bit of time on that I think you can take it from ah number of perspectives, from developing software to replacing jobs or any number of things.
00:31:47
Speaker
But broadly, how do you see ai playing into business or marketing and communications or even the peso model at the moment?
00:31:59
Speaker
Oh my gosh, there's so many applications. oh yeah it's I mean, I love it. And it sounds like you do too. i think there's, it has made us significantly more productive.
00:32:13
Speaker
And just from a personal perspective, I used to procrastinate a lot. I don't procrastinate anymore. I don't because it gets me started, right? at least It at least gets me something on paper that I can then start to formulate something. And, you know, I, yeah on,
00:32:30
Speaker
Night before last, I was kind of surfing social media, scoom-scrolling a little bit. and decided I couldn't read the news anymore. And so I opened my laptop back out back up.
00:32:41
Speaker
It was probably 8.15. And i pounded out a blog post, which I would not normally be able to do at 8.15 at night because I'm way more productive in the morning. But because I had already had AI sort of create the outline for me, ah it just flew right through my my fingertips, which didn't happen three years ago, right?
00:33:02
Speaker
um So from a personal perspective, it's fantastic. I also have been testing AI clone of myself, and i got it. It's not quite ready for primetime, but it's really close. Yeah.
00:33:17
Speaker
And then I was looking at it and I was like, holy cow, this is scary. Because anyone can take video of you from YouTube, throw it into the AI and have it create a clone of you and then tell you tell it what you want it, to what they want it to say. And I'm like, you can't tell.
00:33:35
Speaker
It looks like you. it sounds like you. It has the same mannerisms as you. And all of a sudden you're like, I didn't say that. it's It's really scary. It's very cool, but it's also very scary.
00:33:46
Speaker
And I think we're at a crossroads right now where we have to decide what do we do with this? Because, you know, i think everybody, when you could cookie um visitors and you could follow them through their their customer journey and you and now we can provide ads, we can serve up ads based on interest, right?
00:34:06
Speaker
Which from a marketing perspective, freaking love. I remember people were like, oh, but this is so dangerous and my privacy and my data, we are so beyond that now. People can literally take a video of you a two minutes video.
00:34:21
Speaker
That's it. And it will create an AI clone of you and it will make it sound like you are have supported all of the craziness that's going on in the world, even if you don't. um So I think we're at a
00:34:35
Speaker
philosophically, we're at a cliff where it could start to be really dangerous. I had a friend post on on social just a couple of days ago, what happens if we have AI bots that are the House of Congress?
00:34:50
Speaker
And they take all of the data. It's interesting, right? You think about it. you They take all of the data from their constituents and they say, okay, 90% of my constituents want this. So our of our constituents want this. So they create legislation on that.
00:35:04
Speaker
You still have human oversight of people who've been elected to make sure that it's correct. But how does that change? How does that change the world? think we're there. i think that that's what's going to happen. So there's a big philosophical thing that we have to think about while we're also making ourselves far more productive and not procrastinating our work.
00:35:24
Speaker
That's interesting. You know, you're reminding me, I was just talking with someone yesterday about, so gosh, what was it? 20, 30 years ago there, you could call 411 to get information.
00:35:40
Speaker
Yes. And Google made their own version. It was, I think it was 1-800-GOOG-411. Was I don't remember. was it i don't remember Yeah, you know, you used to have to pay whatever it was, a quarter or something would be billed to your landline or something, you know, when you were calling 411. But Google 411 was free but google one one was free and What it turned out that Google was doing, and then they did this with Google Voice at the same time, was they were recording all of the conversations and using that to optimize sure not just the data of the information of the response, but also to optimize the voice responses and to you know train on the way that you or I would speak and ask questions.
00:36:26
Speaker
And now there are companies that I think the company's called Teleperformance that makes software for call centers. And they have a software that removes the accent of whoever the call center worker is. now and Now this was marketed, ah sorry, this was sort of talked about over the last few months in the media as like, you know, quote unquote whitening or Americanizing largely Indian sure yeah workers accents.
00:37:00
Speaker
And I think there's an argument that could have been made if they had been in front of it to say this improves communication, you know, because like I got my master's in German and I have a terrible American accent in German. It's really hard for people to understand me I just never worked on my accent.
00:37:19
Speaker
So if I sounded like a native German, it would be heck of a lot easier for people to understand me. But, you know, we could talk about positive or negative implications ah or or spin on this. But It seems clear to me that where they're going is that they will be recording every single call and they are processing on the fly what someone is saying.
00:37:43
Speaker
And then in six or 12 months, they're going to say, well, we know how people talk and we have all the information because we have millions of minutes of calls. So now you don't need any of those people.
00:37:55
Speaker
Right. And, right you know, it seems like in so many places that There should be a lot of opportunity, but also with all of the uncertainty, you know, it creates, what do they call it? VUCA, right? Volatility, uncertainty, change, and ah forget what the a is.
00:38:13
Speaker
but That's the time we live in. Yeah, it is. It is. and you think about, i mean, certainly there has been lots of change in the centuries well of live of the world, right?
00:38:25
Speaker
You know, the horse turned into the car, which lost jobs. I remember reading a couple of years ago an article about how... um Self-driving cars are going to reduce things like ah organ donors because there's going to be far less accidents.
00:38:41
Speaker
And then so what what do you what do people do if you can't get an organ? I mean, the the implications of that are... while you don't eat While you want to be there to be less accidents, there's also life-saving that goes on because of it, right?
00:38:56
Speaker
And so you there's all these implications, I think, of all of this stuff. And that never has changed. I think what's changed is the speed that it's coming at us. I mean, this has happened so much faster than anything else in our lifetimes that has happened. And and social media came fast.
00:39:12
Speaker
the apple The iPhone came fast. This is even faster. And so it's really... I think you're right. It's there will be people will figure it out and people will find new ways. think we're in this world right now where customer service, the the more repetitive jobs, things like that will be replaced. I just read an article that said that probably in our industry, you don't need a junior professional because AI can do a a better job than somebody fresh out of college. So what do those kids do? They still have to
00:39:45
Speaker
Learn the job. So what are we going to teach them so that they can go, they can advance their careers if they're not doing what the AI is doing now? Well, I suppose bringing a little bit of this back around to some of the work that you're doing today, because I also want to do justice to making sure that people know where to find you and all that.
00:40:09
Speaker
Do you think that, and I'm not trying to make an ad for you or the pace model here, but It seems to me like if the peso model might be utilized or championed more from a strategy level, like maybe there's a place for the peso model alongside other I don't want to mischaracterize it, but strategy sort of frameworks or education.
00:40:41
Speaker
And so maybe I'm looking to hire someone who's junior, but in a year from now, I'm looking to hire not a junior ad manager or junior copywriter as much as I'm looking for the right personality and skillset.
00:40:56
Speaker
That's right. For someone to be able to execute or lead things that would utilize efforts that would utilize the peso model. Yeah, I mean, it's one of the things that we're looking at is exactly that.
00:41:11
Speaker
And it's advancing the the thinking a lot more quickly than I think we anticipated, which is great. I love it. ah But, you know, a few months ago, we launched the Peso model GPT just to kind of test out what that might look like and how the industry-wide could use something like that to dictate the way that they build their plans but still need the strategic oversight of the human? Like, you can't use the GPT and be like and say, create me a PACE-O-MODO plan and it does it effectively.
00:41:39
Speaker
Can you say... I'm thinking about doing this, this, and this. Strategically, we need to do this, and these are the goals we need to meet. How would you create the plan? Yeah, absolutely. But you have to have the business objectives. You have to have the ideal customer profile.
00:41:53
Speaker
You have to have your brand guidelines. You have to have the strategy. You have to have your KPIs. You have to have all of that to input it in order to do that. So I think you're right. I think we're we're in a place like that. and And going back to the young professionals, we have kids about the same age. And I remember when we were looking at schools,
00:42:10
Speaker
and what We were interviewing schools around Chicago because that's the way they do things um here. and I remember sitting in informational after informational after informational session with all of these schools and every single one of them. So this is 13 years ago, 14 years ago.
00:42:27
Speaker
Every single one of them said, we have no idea. what jobs will be available for these kids when they graduate from high school and certainly no idea what they're what jobs will be available when they graduate from college.
00:42:40
Speaker
So we're focused on building the most well-rounded human being that can go out into the world and make a change no matter what job's available. And I think that that's what young professionals have to think about now is,
00:42:54
Speaker
Do I need to understand how to prompt AI? Do I need to understand how to edit the output? Do I need to have a i basic enough knowledge to be able to know that this is kind of crappy, but I can make it better?
00:43:06
Speaker
Yes. Do i e do i do even better if I'm making change for the world around me? For sure. And I think that that's how, you know, somebody fresh out of college or with five or less years of experience is going to have a be more effective in their roles than saying, i can write a news release.
00:43:24
Speaker
Yeah, I totally agree with you. Well, you know, we only have a few more minutes before have to send you off to a meeting because you have a very busy schedule. So I said, I want to do justice to, you know, why people reach out to you, where they should connect with you. You mentioned having a blog and so on. So first and foremost, I want to ask,
00:43:49
Speaker
you know, who should think about or who should look up, look into the PESO model. And then second, how do people find you, connect with you, subscribe to your blog or anything else?
00:44:01
Speaker
The PESO model,
00:44:04
Speaker
this this may come across as snotty. um I believe because of the way it has evolved and the way that it's working and because of the science that's behind it and the research that's gone into it, I believe that anybody who's not using it in the next few years between that and AI won't have a job.
00:44:24
Speaker
I don't think AI is going to replace you if you keep up. um But any marketer or communicator who wants to evolve their skills or do more, understand more than just what they're an expert in, understand how paid, shared and owned, integrate into the work that you're doing but with earned, for instance, that it's it it is the place that you should get that information.
00:44:47
Speaker
And then use that to understand how you can sort of orchestrate your symphony of AI robots, because I think that's where that's where the future is going for sure.
00:44:59
Speaker
And then spinsucks.com. That's easy. Is that the place that people go to, you know, find whatever outlet they prefer? You know, some people like the email newsletter or social media or whatever else that that's the central location.
00:45:15
Speaker
That's everything. We have everything there. YouTube, all our social, the blog, the newsletter, everything. It's all there. Awesome. Well, I suppose before I let you go Jenny, is there, are there any last parting words of wisdom or things that you want to make sure to leave people with?
00:45:33
Speaker
Yes. And i I think we've both touched on this.
00:45:39
Speaker
We're in an interesting time right now, both industry-wide and in the in the country, in the world. um And it's scary. It's scary.
00:45:51
Speaker
But I think that if you... embrace what's happening, especially with AI, and you learn how to use it. And you made the point earlier that, you know, if you if you just test it out, you'll find that there's another iteration and another iteration and another reason to use it.
00:46:07
Speaker
You know, I had somebody join our team earlier this year and he was scared of it. And I said, just use it for something personal. And so he was doing his baseball, ah fantasy baseball.
00:46:17
Speaker
And so he he created what he would normally do. And then he threw it into chat GBT to see what it said. And he and it came up up with a couple of trades that he hadn't thought of. And so he was like, all right, you're right. This is kind of cool. So play with it personally. Embrace it from that perspective, because I i do think we're at a cliff where we have to figure out ethically the right ways to use it.
00:46:40
Speaker
But you want to be part of that conversation. You don't want to be left behind. And I think AI will replace you if if you don't embrace it. But it's not going to replace you just because it's AI. I totally agree with you.
00:46:51
Speaker
Well, Jenny, thank you for being here. I really appreciate it. And, you know, I wish we had three times this amount of time. Oh my gosh, me too. We could keep going forever.
00:47:03
Speaker
So I hope that anyone who listens to this enjoys it. And thank you again for being here. It was my pleasure. Thanks for having me. Thank you. Hey, thank you for listening. I hope you got a lot out of today's conversation.
00:47:16
Speaker
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00:47:34
Speaker
We specialize in helping leaders with challenges around marketing, communications, and leadership so they can inspire real action in their people and audiences.
00:47:45
Speaker
Thanks again for listening, and I hope you'll come back for future episodes.