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AI in Business, AI Agencies, & Writing Books with Ai #AIintheSky
151 Plays1 year ago
In this episode of the AI-Driven Marketer, Dan Sanchez and Marc Angelos dive into the fascinating world of AI in marketing, tackle multiple AI news items and discuss its impact on marketing.
Timestamps:
00:00 AI in the sky: exploring AI's impact.
05:36 CEO should lead company-wide AI implementation.
08:38 AI transformation in marketing leads whole organization.
11:37 Building custom GPT, feeling similar to marketing ops.
13:35 Marketing professionals need to study AI integration.
17:01 AI's impact on content and book relevance.
21:54 Struggling to soundproof a studio, book disappointment.
23:32 Desire to use AI to enhance content.
28:57 Podcast to book, adapting to AI changes.
31:03 Potential danger in creating a book unnecessarily.
37:18 People prefer authentic communication over polished content.
40:07 Developing consistent, unique brand personality for success.
41:37 YouTube thumbnails must feature logo and face.
44:40 Seeking feedback on potential recurring segment format.
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Transcript
Introduction and Overview
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome to AI in the Sky. This is a prototype episode that I'm going live with, with my friend Mark Angelos to talk about AI because
00:00:17
Speaker
In a world where a lot of people are seeing this AI thing and it's looming and everybody including me are talking about the AI, AI is written on the wall. It seems kind of ominous and a lot of people act like Chicken Little like it's like falling from the sky and it's like knocking out jobs and all that kind of stuff. So even this, this is kind of a beta episode where Mark and I are going to explore
00:00:40
Speaker
talking about AI topics, what's in the news with AI, contextualize it for marketing, how it impacts us in order to make it less ominous, in order to make it approachable, and talk about how the things that are happening with AI can impact marketers in good ways, and maybe in some bad ways, and we can give some caveats to what to avoid or what to go towards.
AI in Business and Marketing
00:01:01
Speaker
This is a new format for me. I know, Mark, you've done a lot of live streaming with our friend, Joe Polizzi.
00:01:08
Speaker
But I'm excited for this to really experiment here and talk about some things that are going on with AI. We certainly know that there's so much happening every single week we will never have stuff to run out of if we do this weekly. So thanks for joining me, Mark. Yeah, pleasure's mine. Honestly, I think it's great, Dan, because the whole concept of when something is so new, there's no place to go to learn it. So as you were saying earlier, throwing stuff on the wall, seeing what sticks, learning from each other, that's really the most ideal way to do this.
00:01:37
Speaker
So hang tight, this is episode one of AI in the Sky. Might change the name, might change the format, but we're gonna experiment here and do it for it. We're gonna build this little show in public and talk about the modifications along the way. Today I have a number of different topics we're gonna be talking about from AI shifting in business, the rise of AI agencies, writing books with AI, and what the current state of AI video is and what we can learn from it.
00:02:03
Speaker
But let's dive into that first topic. I noticed Anthropic put out some news that Cloud3 has come and it's focused on enterprise needs, which I'm like, huh. It seems like AI agencies, including Microsoft making co-pilot and all that kind of stuff, everything's starting to shift for business. It's almost like last year,
00:02:24
Speaker
everybody was like AI bam it was like this general use case they they pulled up the veil and it was kind of like here it is but it seems like this year things are starting to tighten up to be sold even from the general companies like open AI and anthropic now it's almost like they smell money dan
00:02:44
Speaker
Yeah, I think that the thing is these enterprise companies, they were taken off guard, in my opinion, is how quickly this thing advanced. The creators jumped on this right away. You saw a lot of the small companies take advantage from efficiency of cost savings to workflow. And all of a sudden, those enterprise guys are like, whoa, there's actual value here.
Ownership of AI Initiatives in Enterprises
00:03:03
Speaker
How do we integrate this? What do we actually do? Instead of just saying this is a cool tech, where do we put it inside our systems?
00:03:10
Speaker
I know everybody I talk to, and I think we said this in the podcast that we recorded a few weeks ago, but publishes on this Friday on the AI driven marketer.
00:03:17
Speaker
Uh, that every, every company's talking about this. Yeah. Every fortune 500 company is talking about the impact of AI and where it should be, where it should be placed right now. Um, I know every friend I talked to across almost every industry from dog food formulation to accounting. And of course, marketing is all it's all over is talking about how AI is going to do stuff.
00:03:41
Speaker
Two thoughts though here, Dan. Number one, everyone is talking about it, but not every one of those companies is actually doing anything right now. Believe it or not, mega giant companies still have not even begun to move. Secondly, who exactly inside those big enterprise corporates owns the AI silo? This is a conversation I've had with the guys over at the AI Marketing Institute.
00:04:04
Speaker
Is this a marketing thing? Is it a technology thing? Does this fall under the business revenue? There's no clear cut owner right now of the AI initiative in these giant mega corporations.
00:04:18
Speaker
I just recorded an episode with a guest Courtney Baker about this one topic. The title of the episode is Who Owns AI? I want to hear, give me your take on who should own AI and then I'll give you mine that I came to a conclusion after that long episode where we kind of explored that. The caveat is I come out of 30 years of finance Wall Street like I'm a corporate drone back in the day. I run my own company now, but so I'm a little biased in my view is my point, which maybe is good for the show.
00:04:44
Speaker
In my opinion, I think it should be owned by marketing. That's where it belongs. It's where you're going to get the most efficiency. It's where you're going to build connection with the customer. That is the functional purpose of any marketing department. AI is just built for that. In real life, it's got so much hair on it right now. There's an IT piece in here required to institute this inside marketing. They're not going to want to get involved because it's a whole new thing. Who's the person that runs it? It's almost like blockchain. There's no expert in it yet.
00:05:14
Speaker
And so marketing will want it. Will they be able to pull that off? There's the same argument about who has a say at the executive table when big decisions are being made and there's marketing being left out of that conversation. I'm not saying they will be, but I think that initially it's going to be an argument until money's companies start to shift marketplaces. And then all of a sudden a market will end up owning it, but that'll take a few years. Here's my take. You'll have to see how you react to it now.
AI's Impact Across Industries
00:05:44
Speaker
But after talking about it, I'm like, dude, this this thing's going to impact everything from services to accounting, fulfillment, manufacturing. It's going to be so widespread from the bottom to the top that I don't see it going anywhere else than the CEO being the one to really push it forward as a thing company wide. I do think I think and I think it has to be owned by everybody. But because it's got to be owned by everybody, then the CEO has to be the one to really lead the charge.
00:06:13
Speaker
I think marketing should be the model department to be the model for championing it, working with IT because, I mean, eventually we're going to have to figure out how AI works cross organization. I mean, cause otherwise like you don't really get the real benefits of AI, the competitive edge of AI comes with data, but then you got to work with your CIO in order to tap into the data, right? Beyond what marketing has access to.
00:06:39
Speaker
I want to just parse that word, AI, initials, acronym. It's not just one thing, Dan. I think on the creator side of things, people are using AI for creative, generative, they're innovating it. On the corporate side, AI is not being used to innovate anything yet. It's going to be used to save money, efficiency play, building internal workflows. You were talking earlier, how do we take a 16-day process into eight or whatever it is?
00:07:08
Speaker
That's not the same thing. And so the executive has to lay the land out and say, this is where we're headed. I agree with that. The chief executive should be the driver. But in real life, there's going to be a new person that will emerge inside these firms that's somewhere between technology and marketing. So martech was always a thing, but now it's not just knowing tools. It's understanding token parsings. That's pretty technical.
00:07:33
Speaker
So yeah i think i think there's room for a chief a officer i think it's that big of a different differentiate which is why we went from like head of tech like cto to cio there is enough of a different different thing going on with data that they needed someone to just think about the data.
00:07:48
Speaker
I think the same thing will happen with AI. I could see that in big companies. At first, it'll fall under the director of technology, if you're a mid-sized company, as the one kind of spearheading an org. They're not spearheading, they're really facilitating it across departments, because every department will have their own tools. Like, how do you take into account that the HR tool has AI incorporated into it, but so does the HubSpot, right? They have their own AI systems, but there will be cross-departmental AI systems too, and somebody has to facilitate that.
00:08:18
Speaker
Right. You're going to get into this whole argument over
Marketers as AI Thought Leaders
00:08:22
Speaker
personality. There was always this whole conversation around, was the person running the firm a product person or a salesperson? Were they a people person or were they a technology person? This is an interesting dynamic now is going to occur inside of marketing slash tech because they're two different types of people generally that now you're marrying skill sets.
00:08:42
Speaker
So this is a good conversation because I think if you're a marketer listening to this, especially if you're a marketing leader, you have to know that this is going to impact the whole company. And if you're, if you're the person that's already like innovating and pushing this forward, start thinking about how you can lead the cause for your whole department. And I think it has to be a mixture of top down and bottom up.
00:09:03
Speaker
Um, cause if you don't go bottom up, you're going to miss out and you're going to, you might end up orchestrating things top down and then you alienate a few people on your team. So it becomes a huge collaboration, but if you can model it, you will set the tone for the whole organization. Cause marketing is like marketing and sales specifically are like really running with this thing. Um, and there's no road, there's no roadmap for how to implement this. There's no, like we've, we've kind of know what digital transformation looks like. No one really knows what AI transformation looks like yet.
00:09:32
Speaker
But since most of the use cases are coming from marketing, marketing gets to be the playbook that gets to write it for the rest of the organization.
00:09:38
Speaker
I'm going to put a practical handle on your tip stand, which I agree with 100%. What that means for the marketers who are listening to this, who really want to become more of a resource, is to do exactly that, to be able to bring insight to the company itself, like update people on what you understand about it, potential use cases, how you think it could be deployed inside the firm. When you share these thoughts now, whether or not your firm deploys that, you become that person, that internal thought leader in that regard. And later, that's important for things like career.
00:10:08
Speaker
So moving on to our next topic.
Rise of AI Agencies
00:10:10
Speaker
I wanted to talk about the rise of AI agencies. This is something you introduced me to just a few weeks ago. You're like, have you heard of Liam Otley? And I was like, no. So I Googled him, watched a number of his videos. Recently I saw a video, he did this like 60 minute long presentation on like the five types of AI businesses of which he kind of rolls up AI consulting, AI education, AI agency, and AI SAS and AI freelancing.
00:10:35
Speaker
The reason why I wanted to bring it up into this show, because I think all of those are going to touch marketers. And I think even a lot of marketers that are listening to this now could be rolled like, like all freelancing agency, education, consulting, um, and working with SAS is something that a lot of marketers do. These things will start to bleed over into your work, whether you're currently just a normal consultant or freelancer product marketing, whatever you're currently doing, it's going to start bleeding over.
00:11:00
Speaker
So I think it's time to start paying attention to these things, not only because it's going to bleed over, but a lot of us might make the jump over from being a marketing consultant to being a AI.
00:11:10
Speaker
marketing consultant. I think that's just the thing that's going to happen. For some context on this, what used to be the social media marketing agency back in the day, the SMMA's, we all know that. This is the new SMMA. It's a facility, really is what it is, that goes into larger organizations. Instead of just helping people with their social, you're actually helping them with their workflows, with their interfaces, with the customer, and building projects that help them get stuff done quickly inside of their marketing teams. So it's consultancy.
00:11:40
Speaker
One of the things I've noticed about these, because I'm actually fiddling around with this now. I actually have a client that I'm doing, I guess you could say I'm doing AI freelancing for. I'm actually working with them to build a custom GPT. And I'm hoping to document that and publish about it later. But right now, since it's in the process, I won't say who it is or what we're building. I'm finding, now that I'm in the process of it, that it feels mostly like what MarketingOps was.
00:12:09
Speaker
having to like define like, what do we want to have happen here? What are the inputs? What are the steps that I have to essentially automate with AI in order to achieve an outcome to take what used to take two weeks for them down to one day, right?
AI in Creative Jobs
00:12:23
Speaker
And I'm wondering, I'm like, if you're going to start leaning into AI, it's almost like if you have a marketing ops background, you're going to be able to excel faster, because I think a lot of the thinking is similar. What do you think?
00:12:33
Speaker
That's interesting. I could see that. So I don't come out of marketing office, but I totally agree with you. There's three basic applications, at least at this early stage, of what these AI agencies are doing. Number one is the chatbot. They are creating an interface very simply. I mean, it's a couple hundred bucks for a firm to build this, and now you have a whole client servicing division, if you will, on your website. And that's really more from the business model standpoint of these agencies. That is their lead hook, a cheap, low-cost way to get involved.
00:13:03
Speaker
The second thing is then AI workflows. Once they are in the conversation with these prospects, these bigger firms, the conversation evolves into what do you guys do normally for your clientele? How can we make your process more efficient? Then the third thing, that's hopefully from the business model perspective leading to custom AI build-ups like you're already doing, Dan, you're ahead of the curve here.
00:13:26
Speaker
How do we build you a custom GPT so that the content writing sounds like your firm's voice or etc. But those three steps are basically where we are right now for these AI agencies. If you're in marketing right now,
00:13:41
Speaker
And you're learning about these things. I feel like you really need to be studying these things. I mean, obviously I've gone all into this things. I'm like, this is going to take over, but more and more as I'm, even as I'm working on this project for this client, I'm taking a hard thinking work. I'm not, it's a, that's a, I'm working with a consultant, another consultant, this, they consult other businesses. And what I'm doing is automating what used to take someone not, it's not a machine, a step that you could have used with the machine before. It's specifically AI centric.
00:14:11
Speaker
because it's taking, it's doing thinking that a human used to do for planning. And I wish I could get into more specifics, but I'm like, man, this is coming, if it can start doing thinking stuff.
00:14:24
Speaker
It's not an automation tool. It's not just I a intelligent automation, which it's ton. There's tons of that going on. And that's amazing. Like it's starting to dip into thinking work, creativity, not all of it, but creative thinking storytelling type work, which was something humans used to do. So.
00:14:42
Speaker
But Dan, if you look at it, people always expected artificial intelligence to take the low labor job, the ditch digger type stuff, and not be able to touch human
AI in Content Creation and Writing
00:14:51
Speaker
creativity. And ironically, it started at the top. Creative writing was the first thing it whacked out. Now we're into video, text to video that's outrageous.
00:15:00
Speaker
Which kind of comes into this, this next topic I want to talk about, and we might swing back to the AI agency, but I found an app this morning. It was part of an AI newsletter I was reading. And I, it was like, it was just so intriguing that I had to, I had to take a swing at it. The value proposition of this app, and I'll, I'll just shout it out here. It's called inkflow.io is it can generate a 20,000 word book in just a few clicks. So I'm like.
00:15:31
Speaker
Okay. Let's, okay. Like, but I'm curious now. I'm like, what can this actually do? So I go through the website and I'm looking at the website right now. Can I, can I share this screen share? I got strong opinions on this. You're going to love me for this one.
00:15:47
Speaker
Let's take a look at this thing. So this is Inkflow. Generates 20,000 words a book in just a few clicks. Enter your book title, select your language, select your generation model, and boom, out comes a .x file with 20,000 words in it.
00:16:02
Speaker
I was like, okay, I see where this is going. And you know, if I went through the frequently asked questions and one of them, I was like, yeah, but can you lay out your chapters? And no, you're literally prompting it with the title. So it's really not a title. It's like, you think of that as like a one sentence prompt for a whole 20,000 word book. I'm like, it costs a hundred bucks. And of course you have to connect it to, you have to put in your own API key from open AI, which means you have to pay open AI separately.
00:16:30
Speaker
for the tokens you're paying for. I actually don't know how much it costs, but I've already generated a book with it. Cause I went and paid the a hundred bucks. I'm like, okay, you got me. I'll, I'll, I'll give you a hundred bucks if, but I'm not here to get generate books. Obviously I'm not going to be uploading these to Amazon. I'm like, I'm here to learn what's possible when someone's written a script of some kind to prompt AI to write a full book. So I'm, I'm, this is a hundred dollar lesson for me. Now I'm going to generate a bunch of books.
00:16:59
Speaker
What before I reveal the results of this thing and what i'm trying to learn from it. What's your initial reaction? I'm expecting dan says to spit out a book a week now is what i'm expecting But anyway, my reaction is are you familiar with the term content shock? Have you heard this?
00:17:15
Speaker
This is basically the reference to now AI makes it so easy to push button, post content on social that you're overloaded with crap content on LinkedIn, which we both know is the case. So there's three things, this is all my opinion now, there's three things that are going to become more and more important in an AI world than it relates to books in a second.
00:17:35
Speaker
Number one, people want to know experiences, your experiences, Dan, like what you did and how you lived and what you just said before, marketing ops. That's of real value to a guy like me who doesn't come from that. So experiences are going to matter more. Your experience. Number two is having a strong opinion.
00:17:52
Speaker
Like I can get all the factoids I want from Google or chat GPT. I want to know from, again, your experience, what's your opinion? And number three, so that's going to be strong opinions. The ability to tell stories, right? That never went away. Persuasive storytelling. A guy gets up there or a girl and just you're in the palm of their hand in a minute. That's a skill. That becomes relevant when, and I don't know that AI can do those three things yet.
00:18:18
Speaker
Because once you know intellectually this thing isn't a real person, it doesn't matter how persuasive or well-written that story was. So the reason I think that matters for books
00:18:28
Speaker
we're going to get content shock in the book world. There's going to be a thousand books a week that we just, no one's going to care about. And if you have nothing of importance to say, you'll be able to say it faster and easier now. So, but the important thing is folks who really bring insight, that's going to launch them to the forefront, the ability to get over the hump of yourself. How many, who wants to sit down and write this thing? Hormozi is a bestselling author right now. If you listen to him, he writes for six hours every morning before he does anything else and does that for two years.
00:18:59
Speaker
that goes away if you've got AI to help you, but you got to have the, the internal, something valuable to share. So I bit the bullet and bought it. And then I just before, like, gosh, I had a couple of meetings this morning before this thing is I barely threw in one prompt. And luckily, like writing a title for a book, isn't that hard. So I booked generate takes about 15 minutes. It spit out the book to me. In fact, let me, let me share my screen for those was the prompt, write me a book about marketing.
00:19:30
Speaker
No, I'm kidding. I don't know. I'm actually, I'll just, no, I do. I do want to share my screen. So I think it's, it's fun. It's fun to look at this doc, even though you're going to see my desktop with all my crazy icons going on, but
00:19:42
Speaker
Well, we're building a public fan, right? Let's build it. Let's do it. Here's the word, Doc. The title, The Practical Guide to DIY Home Video Studios. A topic I know well. How to build yours in five days. You got to pick between three to six chapters and I picked five and I'm like, well, there's some guidance for it. It didn't go off that at all. Again, I'm trying to prompt it somewhat with the title.
00:20:07
Speaker
And this this is that what it gave me it almost gave me here's chapter one introduction to DIY home video studios Overview of the importance of having a home video studio I have a feeling that this is a consistent thing like every time you get give it a thing It's going to be an overview of the importance of insert topic and that's the prompt that generates this section and then it gave me a numbered list and
00:20:28
Speaker
So unfortunately I can't see your screen. Dan didn't know, but however, your recap was very nice. I can understand the, that's where I think you're using this thing or we should be using this thing. If you're an author research tool, right? We're all, all of a sudden it becomes, here's the way for you to think about the thing you want to write about, start talking about, you know, the importance of whatever. So, and that's again, you overlay that research AI component with the,
00:20:56
Speaker
experiential life thing that you bring. I'm used to clicking the share button and then it going live, but I have to click this. Now you can see this bad boy where it's just a word doc and you can see the formatting is like, it goes straight from like an overview to being like a numbered list. It's not even formatted like a numbered list. So I have to actually like go in here and take them out one at a time.
00:21:17
Speaker
And this is actually, most of the book runs like this. It's like subsection numbered list, subsection numbered list. But now, and this is interesting, so it's changed the formatting day one, day two, or did we change to introduction to the five day building plan, which is a whole chapter later in this book.
00:21:33
Speaker
Chapter two planning your DIY home home video studio and I'm like, you know, this is a horrible book There's sections in here where it's talking about drywall, but it says nothing about why you do drywall it's unlike because it's you would do drywall for like like acoustics, you know for For soundproofing, but it doesn't I'm trying to get back to her. Here we go. Yeah
00:21:57
Speaker
uh trying to get back to it so that you can you know soundproof a room for a studio it's a relevant topic but it kind of went off the mark in multiple places like that and it's just not a very good book but that's part of me is interested to be like well now that i kind of have an idea of what it produces what could i possibly feed it to get a reasonably c c c minus kind of grade book
00:22:18
Speaker
Because I think there are some things that we even with only the simplicity of a title and it Hopefully they launched the ability to set the chapters too because then you could drive it a little further, right?
00:22:28
Speaker
It can do okay. It can do okay. I'm going to even context on this. This is great context. They're doing this exact thing already in the fitness space. So I will literally show chat GPT or turbo, whatever. I want to, I want this body and it's, it's a, an athlete, someone else. It's going to be like an Arnold Schwarzenegger from the 1970s. And how do I turn this into that? And here's the equipment I have. And you show, you show what you got in your house, the weight bench in the basement.
00:22:54
Speaker
And it will go through and make a plan for you day by day and it'll get you there in four years or whatever. This is the same concept where it's going to map out for you. You want to get to this book and this is what you want the book to be.
00:23:06
Speaker
and here's the day by day but then you need to overlay it with in the case of the fitness guys they're doing here's the medical data here's my body mass readings index from the doctor so you got to pump your own data into this overlay to get there i think you're gonna get to that with the book thing you think you're gonna say here's the plan to make the coolest ass marketing book of all time
00:23:28
Speaker
And then Dan Chas has to pump in your experiences from having been marketing apps or whatever, and that will get you there. But it's work.
00:23:36
Speaker
I wish I could connect it to like all the transcripts from a podcast. I wish it could like just read all the blog posts on my site where I've written extensively about how to build home video studios and have stories and all kinds of things in there. Or if I could just feed it my whole course where I talk about home video studios, because then the content would be freaking like it would be so much closer. It would go from F right now. It'd be, it's a solid F to maybe B minus if it was able to pull from my experience, which is how I usually write blog posts with AI right now.
00:24:05
Speaker
I actually like, I outline the blog posts, uh, with the headers and I think through what's in each section. And then I just speak through it. I, I even give the intro and I write the blog posts, but I just talk and record myself. Um, and then I feed it the bullet points, which are the headers and I feed it the transcript of me talking through it. And then it writes.
00:24:27
Speaker
I think we're going that way though. I think that that's where it ends up. Like right now it is very clunky to get your personal information or in your case, the course and everything you've ever written on LinkedIn into this thing. But that's coming because that is exactly what people would want. If I could funnel my entire life into a book, my kid is 15 and he said to me once, dad, you know a lot about business. Can you just write it all down? So I don't have to bother learning at all. True story. And I'm like, Oh yeah, I get to that on Thursday. But like that's where it's headed for your book.
00:24:58
Speaker
I tried to do it with the custom GPT because you can like feed in documents or knowledge for it to go off of, but it, it's like, I found out that knowledge is really an extension that you have to tell it to reference. You have to be like, go search this document, read it, and then do this with it. You can't just be like, here's a bunch of information. Use it to do something fairly large and abstract that.
00:25:22
Speaker
It can't do well yet. I'm sure someone could make an app to do it. Well, just no one has done that yet, but I think we're only a year away from taking what's currently what I currently just experienced with this bookmaker uploading my entire podcast and then coming out with a reasonable book. I think we're only someone, someone's working on this right now. I mean, this guy's already working on or whoever published this tool. I don't even know who made it yet, but the issue is this is available to do now.
00:25:49
Speaker
A lot of there's the technical side of it, which you're right, I agree. But then there's another element here. Like a lot of knowledge is opinion. If I say to you that men and women are different.
00:25:57
Speaker
then the rest of that sentence is going to be very wildly different depending who you speak to. And so that's where the book's interesting angles come from. I was a big fan when I was younger of Robert Kiyosaki's Rich Dad Poor Dad. And he poops all over the school system. And I was like, Oh, I like this. But you know, meanwhile, people who are in the school system would say that's this thing is completely off the mark. My point is there's an opinion factor in books that people buy. Yep. I think
00:26:27
Speaker
a lot of businesses would do well to write a book. I actually think it's a wonderful marketing plan to spend time writing a book and then spend like a whole year repurposing it. Tools like this will come out to make it possible for your CEO or your founder to write books on really good topics based on real stories and real data.
00:26:48
Speaker
and real information that are, even if you have to spin it to an editor or ghost writer afterwards to finalize it and make it look good, it's gonna be able to get it most of the way there soon. So you'll love this. I do executive thought leadership pieces for CEOs in finance. That's where I come from. And a lot of them, I've had this sentence said to me several times, make me sound like Ray Dalio. And so what you're describing right now actually makes that potentially possible.
00:27:18
Speaker
We know they weren't writing their books before. That was the dirty little secret I found out about HBR, right? It's never written by the byline or hardly ever, if it's a guess maybe, but they're all written by professional writers that interview the subject matter expert that doesn't know how to write. They think they do, but they only know how to write academic ease, nobody can understand. But then the writer does the hard work of synthesizing it down into something
00:27:44
Speaker
like approachable and then they give it back to the subject matter expert and they're like, yeah, that's what I said. It's no different than Walter Isaacson or whoever. They do these biographies of these famous entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, but Steve didn't write the book. It was a writer who wrote the book. Yeah, a ton of work. The thing is AI is getting better at understanding the context of it and actually producing that. I know I'm using AI to write more and more, but I'm also like,
00:28:10
Speaker
a C plus
AI in Storytelling and Narratives
00:28:11
Speaker
writer. I'm not an A plus writer. I want to dig into that for a second, Dan. From the perspective of the marketing world right now, if you're a marketer and you're in, how can you actually help your executive C-suite leverage this potentially? What would we do? Would we sit down at the table and just say, we're going to do a biography of why this company exists, or we're going to walk through the founder's principles of the mission of this firm, or do we do
00:28:40
Speaker
you know, like they'll probably attack case studies and client use cases is Mike is the go to is my guess. Yep. What would you recommend? What do you think would be the most effective way if you could funnel all that information into this book machine and make the cool book? How should a marketing team do use it? Honestly, this is what I'm doing with the podcast right now. Great. Even with this podcast, I am like my end goal for the podcast at the end of the year, since the goal is to master AI in 2024 for myself is to
00:29:10
Speaker
We'll finish with a book.
00:29:12
Speaker
Even if it's like version 1.0, because obviously AI is going to change every year. So how, what it means to be an AI driven marketer will change over time, but I'd like to write somewhat of a roadmap based on all the lessons learned from the podcast. So how I'm planning on doing it, which is what I think good marketing teams will do, even with their founders is use a podcast to pull out this stuff. Because it's so hard to sit down to a blank paper and be like, well, how do I organize this thought? Shoot. I even sat down with my friend who's a chiropractor yesterday.
00:29:41
Speaker
And he wants to make course content. Well, I'm like, you know, just do the journalism thing. Who, what, when, where, why, how? And I'm like asking him questions about his, his basic thing that he wants everybody to go through. And I pulled out the course content out of them. I'm like, here's, here's the videos. One's on what, one's on why, one's three videos on how.
00:30:00
Speaker
And then one on when and where i'm like there's your but it's just drawing it out of people i'm sitting down and that's what a podcast is great for cuz you can literally like use content marketing to build your way there and then use a i to take all the raw content the episode footage to.
00:30:19
Speaker
synthesize a lot of it, turn it into the rough, rough drafts of the book, right? And then use a writer to finish it. And you go through it and start doing, doing the work of adding, Oh, it'd be nice if we had some stats here, it'd be nice if we had a little story here, it'd be nice if we had an extra illustration here. But AI will be able to take the transcripts and outline it. And I'm hoping the tools become a little bit better. Instead of just using a custom GPT to do it in the future, like 10 months from now, I'm sure this book technology will be farther along, you'll be able to feed it more.
00:30:49
Speaker
So you can take a year to build your way up to the book and talk about the journey of building the book and building the next way of revolutionizing the industry in that way you want to with your company. Publish the book and then spend a whole next year repurposing that while you're on kind of like revamping up for your next big thing. The only danger I foresee would be making a book just for the sake of having a book. The companies all want a book.
00:31:13
Speaker
I think that what you're describing is very strategic and very goal or you know where you're going with that and why you're doing what you said I'm doing this with the podcast actually. That's good, Dan, because you think strategically and I think that the market who thinks that way will leverage this tool properly. My fear is a lot of these bigger companies are just going to bang on it. Yeah. Well, I mean,
00:31:35
Speaker
There will always be people who do it well and people who don't do it so well. Yet that shouldn't stop people from thinking about it as a strategy or a tactic to publish thought leadership and create a lot of really cool content on the way there and then to repurpose afterwards. I'm reminded of Stephen Covey begin with the end in mind, but that would be very like this is an effective tool. Almost what podcasts brought back in the day, books could potentially bring to the marketing team.
00:32:05
Speaker
So that's, that's the hypothesis. I figured I'd invest a hundred dollars today and whatever I pay in API credits. And at least I'm like, at least it'll be something freaking interesting to talk about on LinkedIn. Yeah. Another experiment to be like, Hey, tried this, it failed or kind of worked here. Now you don't have to waste your money on an AI bookmaking tool. I think it's cool. But I expect I'll learn something in the process of spitting out like 15 crappy books. Maybe, maybe each one gets a little bit better, but we'll see.
00:32:35
Speaker
You know, it's funny though, closing comment. Everyone understands how AI is destroying video and the whole Hollywood business model. No one's really looking at the book world because it's doing the same thing there. Oh yeah. It's doing it faster there. I haven't even taken a look at like the audio section yet or the ebook library, but I'm sure the ebook library is blowing up with a bunch of crappy books right now. I'm sure.
00:33:00
Speaker
I need to go look.
Advancements in AI Video Production
00:33:01
Speaker
Maybe when we do this, again, I'll bring up the stat to see what I can dig up on that. Last thing to talk about is the current state of AI video. Yeah, segue, baby. The current state of AI video. I mean, Sora from OpenAI last two weeks ago, it's unbelievable the advances that have happened way faster than anybody expected. And honestly, that's been the missing link in the marketing world, in my opinion.
00:33:29
Speaker
Writing was always a marketing strength. Video required production, required money. It required budget that people, frankly, didn't want to put towards it. That whole agency world existed because of that. You go back to Mad Men in the 1950s and 60s, you can now do this out of any company's back room janitor closet.
00:33:54
Speaker
It's so funny because Sora that announcement only came out a few weeks ago, but it already seems like old news Even though it was like literally revolutionary. We were all everybody was like, oh Yeah, I thought this was at least a year away I know I saw midget when mid journey launched mid journey six at the end of December I was like, whoa and then of course I thought like I Wonder when I wonder when video will be this good and I was thinking I bet a year from now We'll see mid journey six level of video
00:34:22
Speaker
Yeah, dude that rocked the world the month or runway Mid-journey all those guys would take it Did you see the video of the woolly mammoths whatever walking through the snow? It's it's like it's unbelievable that that's from words Yeah, and all almost all the shots at least all the ones they're demoing right now And of course you can play with it like in the limited way and see like what else it makes but I'm like it's good and of course it has its oddities and weird stuff, but I'm like I
00:34:49
Speaker
And we're not on version 1.0 either. It's obviously been tweaked a lot over the years, but like a lot of people are making like the Will Smith scenario of the spaghetti and comparing it to now. And that was only one year difference. You're like, yeah, this is exponential improvement. If it got from the Will Smith video of him, a really weird and awkward zombie looking version of him and his fingers look like the spaghetti itself. Sticks fingers. Eating spaghetti to like the craziness we have now, I'm like,
00:35:16
Speaker
Okay, what will we what will be like a year from now? Like this is this is just nuts. And this is where people start getting scared of AI. But I'm like, well, here it is. Let's learn how to maximize it. What it tells me is that AI is fasting, AI is progressing faster than everyone expects, even the people that are reading up on the news every single week are like, Oh, shoot, this is nuts.
00:35:37
Speaker
So two things, I don't want to get into the whole controversy of it yet because of the whole politics. But I do think that there is something to be said for relationship building. That is the whole purpose of marketing. And this video builds relationship quicker. These are all facts have nothing to do with AI. So how are you strategically using this AI tool now, which is unbelievable, to build a relationship? I think this, because the tech has moved so fast, the strategy is lagging.
00:36:04
Speaker
people there was a pizza commercial made a couple of a year ago do you remember this was a video it was a text to video pizza commercial for a fake pizzeria it was hilarious because the people had six fingers and you couldn't tell there's the cheese and the person that's gonna become
00:36:21
Speaker
believable enough already it is, where you can actually deploy stuff now. This isn't just cool, it's coming. It's here. So what's the strategy? Nobody knows. Hence the value of this program. I think that these companies are going to have to sit down and say, okay, do we really want a relationship or are we really just trying to sell stuff? Transactional is very different from relational.
00:36:43
Speaker
And you can take it any way you want. There's a lot of, you know, there's a, there's a whole conversation around that. But I think this text to video is going to be the main thrust for most marketing teams in the next year. Why wouldn't it be? It's simple, it's cheap, and it's the most effective medium.
The Human Element in AI Content
00:37:01
Speaker
And you've said it before, which is part of the reason why I was interested in doing this live stream, right? Is the people who do live now will have an advantage because
00:37:10
Speaker
Hey, I can't do stuff live and it won't be able to at least for a little bit, but maybe we'll be shocked by that. And like July, it's like, and now we could do live and respond to the comments. You're like, what? I don't know. You know what? You know how social media today, Dan is very, it's a little bit grungy and people like that. You don't want the Hollywood polish. Yep.
00:37:31
Speaker
That's the same, AI has brought that Hollywood polish, but the live gets it back to people ums and ahs and stuttering and thinking for a second. Humans want that. They don't, they don't want, when they're getting information or if they want to understand a company and they're thinking of a big purchase or you're about to do a deal with someone, you want to know the real them. So if there's an AI, Hey, Jan avatar of Dan and Mark talking with 11 lads voices, and it's not really us, but it's the same conversation, it's not going to be as effective.
00:38:00
Speaker
No, I I even find my own habits with youtube and youtube's been inundated with b-roll videos Um, and you don't even know if the voice behind the b-roll is real But I go, you know, I do I do what most people do every time i'm like researching something like a couple years ago I was i'm a new homeowner a few years ago and i'm trying to figure out how to take care of my life
00:38:22
Speaker
You know, it's Bermuda grass. I don't know anything about it. So I'm researching it. But I instantly stay away from the videos where I can't see a face of a person who's actually done the research on the lawnmowers. There's plenty of videos being like, Oh, here's the review on this lawnmower. It's all B roll. It's all photos. It's all done by somebody that I can tell how to actually touch the lawnmower.
00:38:45
Speaker
So what do I do? I go look for the youtubers who are like specialized in lawn care and it's literally be like well I bought two lawnmowers it could be an iPhone video. I don't care Give me an honest guy giving an honest review from the middle of nowhere, Texas Doing a video on the lawnmowers for this type of grass That review I trust
00:39:03
Speaker
This is why companies sign the face of their company when Nike brings out a Michael Jordan, you know, as opposed to the Michelin man, which is fine, you know, Mickey Mouse, it's fine, but it's not a real person. I think it's people connect with people. And to your point, Dan, there's a human element of trust there when you want to see a face of a real person as ugly or unkempt or whatever, but you want to know that you're dealing with a person. So I think you're right that that will be a trend of something that companies can do to continue to build trust.
00:39:32
Speaker
Zag while everybody else zigs, right? But it presents a problem. When I was back in finance and I was becoming a LinkedIn name in writing, the companies didn't like not being able to choose the face of their firm. There was friction there for me. And the reason I bring that up is because these companies will have to decide who is the face of the firm. Is it the CEO? And what if they leave? Is it the marketing team?
00:39:56
Speaker
It's easier to control an artificial AI avatar. There's not going to be a dispute over the financing. I don't know. It's going to become an issue for companies, but video is important. That's not going to
AI Personas and Branding
00:40:08
Speaker
go away. It's going to become more the case.
00:40:10
Speaker
You know, I do think there's something there for creating a mascot of sorts. I do. I think, I think, I think you can win by going authentic in building a founder brand or picking subject matter experts or doing even what like Dave Ramsey or the daily wire doing is diversifying away from Ramsey and Shapiro and having lots of personalities or ways it's played out.
00:40:29
Speaker
Um, but I think there's something about creating and i'm trying to do it myself, but I haven't gotten my custom gpt to be consistent enough But I am trying to come up with a personality of like a little robot head That has a consistent personality and it's just like you know, you think of like wendy's and it's just like constantly roasting people Like what if you created a personality and even on video and it has like a system take
00:40:51
Speaker
you know that's unique and fun and then you develop it over time and maybe it starts going on some journeys and then that's that's kind of interesting IP to build and it's way easier to do with AI soon because you can it's getting closer and closer to be able to build consistent characters in something like mid journey or video in the future.
00:41:08
Speaker
So for the marketers out there, all the writers will recognize the term personification. When you assign human qualities to an inanimate object, that personification of companies is going to happen because of this AI capabilities. These companies will have to decide. This isn't fluff like what's our mission and staple to the wall. They have to decide for business purposes, what's the personality of the firm? Literally the voice, male or female. Literally, what does it look like? If you think about Mr. Beast,
00:41:35
Speaker
Jimmy Donaldson's face is famous. Everyone knows him. There is a Mr. Beast logo. It's like a tiger or whatever it is. But that's not what's on his YouTube thumbnails. It's him. So these companies will have to have the logo, the name, and a face. And so Dan, I think you're out of the curve on this one. Sonic branding is another one. What's the sound of the company?
00:41:56
Speaker
The da da da da da for McDonald's or whatever. Companies need to start, because in a content-driven world, we've reached now, A, there's no more excuses, the tools are there, but B, you need to have a strategy in place that people can say, yes, I recognize right away, that's a dancest thing, AI in the sky or whatever. Or I recognize the logo and I know the face attached to that logo.
00:42:19
Speaker
It's important, when Apple has the icon with the bite of the Apple missing from it, but you kind of know Steve Jobs' faces, and Steve isn't even around anymore, but you still associate that. Or Walt Disney, everyone knows what Walt looks like, even though he's holding the hand of a fake mouse. That's where we're headed. Companies in the marketing department especially will lead the charge, what do we want to do that's going to represent this firm's in audio, video, and text?
00:42:46
Speaker
Man, I think just doing a combination of these things, having some sincere, genuine personalities, having some made up personas that you can have some fun with. Are you familiar with Itana? Have you heard of this? She's an AI-generated Spanish supermodel.
00:43:02
Speaker
Oh, the Instagram model. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And she gets hit on all the time by famous celebrities in Europe. She's not real, but, and she's making something like $25,000 a month. The thing is, there's a face there and people know it's fake, but there's a face. That's why if Itana was a robot Itana, it wouldn't be the same. So I think these companies have to start thinking about the psychology behind, like there's tech and the tools are great, but there's another element here.
00:43:29
Speaker
That's interesting. I'd be more afraid as a company to put out something that looked human I'd almost want to run in the other direction and cartoonify it or make it a robot or make it initially not human because I think Especially when you start going into video and it's not a real video as a mascot I just I'm like at least in the short term. I think that's dangerous for companies I a problem of that. I'm like It's easier if it's a mouse
00:43:56
Speaker
In the early days of advertising, you had the Marlboro Man and Ronald McDonald, but you also had Mickey Mouse. That's a lot safer because it's non-human. I think that you're right. I would come up at least at this point with something that's not a very specific human thing.
00:44:14
Speaker
But I think, ultimately, it still needs to have a voice. There needs to be a personality attack. That's the word. It's a personality. I don't have all the human attributes without actually pretending to be human. So I think that's the thing that people get nervous about with AI. Of course, that's going to blow up where it is realistic, and we'll have weird relationships with these AI video-looking things. And I'm like, ah, that's
Audience Feedback and Future Improvements
00:44:35
Speaker
part of the AI. And I'm like, let that come when it comes, because I'm not ready to talk about it yet. Right, right, right. From a marketing perspective, I think that this is something companies should be thinking about. Yep.
00:44:45
Speaker
So this was fun. Hopefully you're listening. Give us some feedback. Hit me up on LinkedIn. Talk to Mark. Um, did you like this format? Do you like what we covered? How about the name AI in the sky? If you don't hear anything, I'm going to do it again and we'll see how it goes. Um, but this I'm hoping to make a reoccurring segment. Um, so, but we wanted, I want to drive it. I'm building into public. Let's drive it with some feedback. So let us know.
00:45:10
Speaker
Yeah, quick behind the scenes, the building of public things, I said to Dan, off record, I was like, this is a great approach, because people want to know, no one knows. We're willing to put ourselves out there, and we'd love the feedback if you guys have any kind of insights. It would help us help you.