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S2 Ep18 Unpacking the Future of AI in Marketing with Pete Steege
44 Plays9 months ago
In this episode of Dial It In, Pete Steege discusses the rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact on businesses, especially in marketing. Pete offers a more cautious perspective on AI's development, emphasizing the need for strategic planning to navigate potential disruptions. Tune in to gain insights on how to approach AI in your organization.
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Dial It In Podcast is where we gathered our favorite people together to share their advice on how to drive revenue, through storytelling and without the boring sales jargon. Our primary focus is marketing and sales for manufacturing and B2B service businesses, but we’ll cover topics across the entire spectrum of business. This isn’t a deep, naval-gazing show… we like to have lively chats that are fun, and full of useful insights. Brought to you by BizzyWeb.
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Website: dialitinpodcast.com
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Transcript
Introduction to Dial It In Podcast
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome to Dial It In, a podcast where we talk with interesting people about the process improvements and tricks they use to grow their businesses. I'm Dave Meyer, president of BusyWeb, and every week, Trigby Olsen and I are bringing you interviews on how the best in their fields are dialing it in for their organizations.
AI's Impact on Business
00:00:24
Speaker
Well, Trigby, it's been a while since we've talked about AI, and I know that we had our chat GPT on as a special valued guest. And we actually have a first for our show. I think we have a repeat guest here with us to help talk about AI. Pete Staggy, hey Pete. I think he's the second repeat guest, but he's... No, wait.
00:00:47
Speaker
Really? He's number one in our hearts. I'm the repeat, repeat guest. We got to meet the guy from Tag Team, the 90s hip-hop band. There we go. This is perfect. Pete and I were chatting the other day because we work together and refer a lot of business to each other.
AI in Marketing: Opportunities and Risks
00:01:09
Speaker
One of the things that came up is the hot button topic on everybody's brains, especially in marketing, and that is AI. Just the rapid development and change that's happening inside of artificial intelligence algorithms and all of the hot happening things like Gemini and GPT and all of that stuff. We thought it'd be really fun to just chat about it live on air.
00:01:38
Speaker
and have Pete bring in his more reasons, I think, outlook than I've got because I'm kind of rah-rah, hey, let's go. Pete's like, well, wait, this is going to mess things up a little bit for a while and we need to come up with plans around that. I'm actually not going to be staying for the podcast. I've actually recorded a soundboard of my voice. There you go.
00:02:05
Speaker
And I'll drop you guys the link. So when you need witty banter, I've got several dozen things that you can say. So yeah, let me try one. That's the spicy hot dog, Dave.
00:02:18
Speaker
Ooh, I don't know. We'll save that one for later. Hey Pete, how are you? I'm great, Trig. Are you welcoming of our new robot overlords or are you fearful of them, Skynet style? I think like most thoughtful humans, I go back and forth a little bit on that.
00:02:39
Speaker
I am just taken aback when I see new applications of it, which happens so frequently, and they do something that I had had in the category of, well, that's something that humans do and not machines do. It's like, wait a minute, that sounds like that's crossing that line. I've had a lot of thought about, wow, what the disruption effect of AI. I'd say good and bad about that.
00:03:07
Speaker
It's got me thinking a lot about what does the future look like for AI technology and humans leveraging AI technology.
Historical Tech Transitions and AI Disruption
00:03:22
Speaker
Does it ever go the other way where the AI technology is leveraging humans? I actually have a hopeful perspective on that and we can get further into it.
00:03:33
Speaker
I think we're going to stay in charge. Even though if you extrapolate some of the trends we're seeing this year, it's hard to quantify that because there are those Skynet kind of comparisons that you see things. So that's my perspective. I'd love to share more about it. Way to go, Pete. Great point. That was about number three. I like that one. Good.
00:03:59
Speaker
I know that marketing is going to be seeing a pretty big leap and a change.
Lessons from Sports Illustrated's AI Misstep
00:04:06
Speaker
And there's been some interesting examples already, like Sports Illustrated got like hugely dinged and it kind of took down the entire publication because they were literally recouping or just dumping all of their content through an AI generator and making it into blog posts and republishing it.
00:04:25
Speaker
Which is truly a shame because there are people of a certain age who grew up understanding prose and understanding long-form writing by reading Sports Illustrated. I was an avid Sports Illustrated reader growing up.
00:04:47
Speaker
Sports Illustrated was a gateway drug into larger, deeper humorists for me, like George Clinton, that you don't see anymore. Right. So knowing that, how do you think AI might be breaking marketing in the near term, Pete?
00:05:07
Speaker
Actually, I'll give you even another recent example in the last week that to me is even a simpler and smaller sign of the pushback. And that was the big to do about Kate Middleton's doctored photograph. Ten years ago, I mean, people have been doing that forever. But that to me, the outrage about her photoshopping a photo
00:05:33
Speaker
I mean, it's a global thing. And to me, that's pointing to the increasing sensitivity of us not knowing what's real anymore. And so I think that's at the core of what's going on. And so you asked about how I see AI breaking marketing in the future.
Authenticity in Marketing with AI
00:05:56
Speaker
If I can, I'd like to walk you through what I see as three likely stages of AI as it relates to marketing. I'm not a futurist, but I have actually in my career, I've been a technology business marketer for 30 years. I was reflecting back on how many different technology transitions I've
00:06:22
Speaker
worked through. I've been in businesses that had to grapple with those changes from semiconductor technology, huge transitions in the 80s where the line widths of the chips were going below visible light and all that had a huge disruption inside these factories.
00:06:41
Speaker
to going from tape drives to disk drives for data centers, to going from spinning disk drives to solid state drives, from going to DVDs to streaming video. I've worked in businesses that had to deal with all of those existential changes to their business.
00:07:03
Speaker
I would argue that AI stands above all of those in terms of disruption. We haven't seen how yet, all of the ways, but there's some familiar things to me and I just want to walk you through what I see about it. Yeah, let's run. Marketing, to me, marketing is all about
00:07:21
Speaker
Relationships and meaning between people right communicating and connecting right that's what marketing is about so those that to me I like to look at what's coming with AI with that lens so
00:07:35
Speaker
When I, my kids were growing up, there were big Pixar fans. We were big Pixar fans. And so let's talk about the, the Incredibles movie. So maybe some younger people might not remember that, but in that movie, I like to call the first phase of AI where we are today, the supers phase. Okay. So that's where.
00:07:56
Speaker
a few of us have the superpower of these tools and there's new applications of every day and like oh my gosh i can't believe they can do that there was one company even that announced the other day that they,
00:08:10
Speaker
replaced 700 customer service phone agents with an AI bot. That's one person doing something that seems superhuman.
Balancing AI and Human Creativity
00:08:22
Speaker
I think we're in the phase now where they're still spotty enough that it's like, oh my gosh, can that happen? A couple of things about that right now, I think AI is not
00:08:37
Speaker
it's still pretty early days on what it can do. Trig, you were joking about the sound bites. We can still mostly tell the difference between AI and real things like the Sports Illustrated stuff. There's pushback about that. The mistake marketers are making right now is what Sports Illustrated did. I guess the lesson to me for
00:09:05
Speaker
marketers or business people on the podcast is, at this point, you absolutely have to avoid putting out AI-accented content and material. Things that you can tell whether or not you literally can tell, you can quantitatively tell,
00:09:30
Speaker
As humans, we can qualitatively tell today in most cases at some point. So you need to use AI in the background and not use it in the foreground in your marketing. Huge productivity advantages. Dave, I know you've talked about that many times, all the different ways that people today can really improve what they're doing. But you have to treat AI as your employee and you have to be the editor and the manager
00:09:59
Speaker
and the director and you can't let AI be the artist. They're the back office.
00:10:09
Speaker
Pete, would you agree with this? I just read something and I'm blanking on where I got it from, but this community purported that what you should do with AI-generated content is follow a 1080-10 rule, and so 10% of your time or content
00:10:32
Speaker
is generating the prompt to come up with a fantastic piece of content. You are a marketer and you're an expert and blah blah blah and you're looking to sell this thing and here are the keywords that you need to ingest, all that stuff. 80% is letting the chatbot do its job and then 10% is cleaning it up.
00:10:57
Speaker
I think that's probably a little heavy on the AI at this point. And I think that kind of thinking is, in my opinion, what's leading to the sloppy, easy to spot AI stuff. So what do you think a good
00:11:14
Speaker
If we had to pair it all the way down to percentages, what should we be leaning on for AI? Is it 30 percent upfront research, 20 percent prompts, and what? I don't even know. Yeah. That's my answer. I can't say that we know yet. It's so cutting edge. It's so changing every week.
00:11:41
Speaker
Even if we said with some accuracy, if we knew some accuracy, okay, it's 20, 60, 20.
00:11:50
Speaker
you'd have to ask me again in two weeks or two months because the world is changing so fast. I like the model of rather than, I don't think we're ready to lock it in in that way yet. I think the important thing is the investment. Maybe the better way to look at it is how much time is your organization investing in exercising and bringing these tools into their work. Rather than think about how much of your production time is spent
00:12:19
Speaker
Is saved by a i think of how much of your learning time. Is it being invested in prompting and. Understanding new tools and integrating different. Automation chains and things so it's it's just it's a learning curve opportunity.
Prompt Engineering and AI Authenticity
00:12:39
Speaker
Okay, yeah, and I agree 100% because like prompts engineering, the tools themselves are learning based on what these engineering engineered prompts are doing. So all of the
00:12:53
Speaker
Cliff's notes of how to generate a prompt are already null and void because you don't have to tell chat GPT or Gemini who they are anymore. You can just tell it, look at this website and build me a persona and it understands. I think all of those, having a
00:13:17
Speaker
set or a very keen eye for reality and making sure that the human or the humanity of your content is still there is probably the biggest watchword for it. Totally. That's my message for today. If I had to summarize my advice to anybody is own your humanity and
00:13:41
Speaker
and by you, I mean your business and your humanity. I would use words like authenticity. My thing for marketing has been for years that marketing's power is in meaning. That's what we talked about last time. Just to summarize that, what that means is businesses and people prospects, whoever they are,
00:14:12
Speaker
don't have time for things that don't have a reason for them. You need to create a purpose for their taking the time to get to know you or take a risk on you or whatever. The things you need to happen to have a new customer. The way that happens is if you have something meaningful to talk about. If you are not being authentic, authenticity is part of that meaning. If you are not being authentic and you're
00:14:42
Speaker
you're being Sports Illustrated or you're being overly sensitive, Kate Middleton. Those things are saying to people, I'm going to let this machine talk to you, not me. You can feel the energy that negates that
00:15:05
Speaker
engagement that is what marketing is all about. Marketers, more than anybody, the closer you get to the customer relationship, the less you can let AI do the work for you, especially today. The converse of that though is that there is also a value in removing the human element.
00:15:29
Speaker
of it.
Navigating Limitless AI-Generated Content
00:15:30
Speaker
So for instance, the actor James Earl Jones has entered into a agreement with the Star Wars people. Oh, yeah. He did a bunch of recordings for AI and now his voice will be licensed. So from now until the end of time, James Earl Jones will always be the voice of Darth Vader.
00:15:56
Speaker
Luke, I am your great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather. Yeah. I love that trick. I'd like to take that point and go into what I see as the next phase of AI, what's coming next. Back to the Incredibles example, that's what I call the syndrome phase.
00:16:15
Speaker
One of the quotes from the movie Syndrome said, he was the evil genius in the movie, right? And what he said was, he had this tool that gave everybody superpowers, superhero powers. And he said, everybody will be super. And when everybody is special, nobody will be.
00:16:37
Speaker
So that's what I see is coming. And if you take the James Earl Jones story and go forward with that, I think what's going to happen next, first of all, more specifically to marketers. I think one of the next things that's coming is a change in the balance of marketing. And what I mean by that is there's going to be a content flood. So think of
00:17:06
Speaker
all the marketers in the world having the choice that Sports Illustrated did, and even more because we're just getting started. Content will be essentially unlimited. It will be free. I'll use the analogy, very small version of what's coming of e-mail automation when it became essentially free to send additional e-mails to additional people.
00:17:36
Speaker
We all know what that has done to our inboxes and our lives. Take that and apply it to every single piece of content you consume in your life. Movies, podcasts, articles, books,
00:17:55
Speaker
Videos, you name it, everything. We're not there. It's going to take a while, but that's, you know, it's coming in not that long a time that all of those things will be able to be created by anybody with, you know, chat TPT or whatever the tool is Sora. And what does that mean?
00:18:17
Speaker
did we as consumers, as prospects, somehow become infinitely more capable, have an infinitely higher capacity of absorbing new content? No. So there's this huge problem because as a marketer, we want to make connections, we want to stand out, we want to reach people, have them reach us.
00:18:42
Speaker
How do you do that when everything is available, infinitely available to everybody? And there's just all of this stuff. So that's what I mean by marketing is breaking because that's the model that we've been working off of for a long time. And that model is not going to work anymore. There's a lot of things. So a couple of other things about that. I think there's going to be an abstraction arms race. So one solution to that problem,
00:19:10
Speaker
is AI is going to give us tools and it already has tools that allows it to summarize content and give it to me in 10 bullets. All that kind of thing. Same with everything else. Actually, there was this great cartoon and I didn't save it, I should have. It was like a New Yorker cartoon or something. It was two split screens.
00:19:33
Speaker
The one screen, it was somebody sitting a computer talking to somebody saying, hey, look what I can do. AI just took this little message and made it into three chapters. Then the next panel shows somebody else saying, hey, look what I did. AI just took these three chapters and put it into two paragraphs. You think of the note takers and meetings.
00:19:57
Speaker
Picture a meeting where none of the humans show up and it's just bots talking to each other. That abstraction arms race. I've actually had that happen to me. I teach a class for several hundred people at a time, HubSpot. One of the things that I do as part of the class is I break people into smaller groups. One guy got of four or five people. They're like 85, 90 different groups.
00:20:26
Speaker
one guy got put into a room with four bots. I love it. Then I was pinging him, introduce yourself. Make sure that you guys share your LinkedIn profile. That is a great story. That's it. It's coming. You can all see that is our future. Then one more thing in this image of the syndrome world is copies of copies.
00:20:55
Speaker
It's related to what I just said, but now picture all these large language models that are creating more content than we've ever created before as humans. And AI works by looking at the content on the web.
AI Learning from AI: The Derivative Reality
00:21:15
Speaker
So now AI is learning from what AI created.
00:21:22
Speaker
And then it's learning from that, and there's this new derivative reality. So the abstraction isn't just in summarizing and expanding. The abstraction is in what's real anymore.
00:21:38
Speaker
And I suspect there'll be some, hopefully, there'll be some learning from that and we'll learn how to teach AI to treat those kinds of derivative content different than original content. But when the derivative content is 10x or 100x or 1000x the original content,
00:22:02
Speaker
the model just no longer works. I don't know what that future looks like, but it's not going to be this reality. I think this is a good place for us to take a break. Once we come back from the break, I want to talk about the extension of that break, which is the butterfly effect as it relates to Ed Sheeran and intellectual property. So stick with us, we'll be right back.
BusyWeb's Solutions for Business Growth
00:22:26
Speaker
Today's episode of Dial It In is brought to you by BusyWeb, your partner in driving growth for business service and manufacturing businesses online. Are you a business service or manufacturing business eager to expand your online presence, generate leads and boost revenue? BusyWeb has what you need. At BusyWeb, we specialize in helping businesses like yours with CRM, marketing, advertising, and website solutions.
00:22:51
Speaker
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00:23:07
Speaker
visit our website at busyweb.com. That's B-I-Z-Z-Y-W-E-B dot com. Or, give us a call at 612-424-9990 to start a conversation. As a special offer for our dialed-in listeners, we're offering a free download of our newest eBook, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About HubSpot.
00:23:30
Speaker
With this free download, we'll share with you how to grow your business with an all-in-one sales, marketing, website, customer service, and CRM powerhouse. Explore the power of HubSpot to decide if it's right for your growth plans. This offers exclusively for Dial It In listeners. Don't miss out. Visit busyweb.com slash pod for more.
00:23:53
Speaker
So Ed Sheeran got sued and he was accused of copywriting his song, The Shape of You. And he took it all the way to trial.
00:24:05
Speaker
And then he sort of obliterated the entire idea of music copyright theft because he got on the stand with his guitar and he played, I think, 30 different songs using the same four chords over the course of 50 years. And it was really just a shocking and amazing thing to see what
00:24:27
Speaker
the, what I use AI for a lot right now, and this is particularly evocative for, evocative, evocative? It's particularly important for Dave's and my day job because as we build websites for people, one of the things we have to do is source photography. And so one of the neat new AI shiny bells and whistles is we can, um,
00:24:56
Speaker
create photos. For instance, I have an AI robot that comes to every single one of my meetings that takes notes from me.
AI's Role in the Future of Creative Work
00:25:05
Speaker
I named it my robot butler, and then I asked the company who provides the service if they could have a picture on there instead of my smiling face, a different picture. They said, sure. So I went on AI and made a picture of a robot butler.
00:25:19
Speaker
That being said, and now they're changing it so that they can do that for My Little Robot Butler, which I think is shocking and funny and awesome all at the same time. My question is this. There is an entire underpinning of creative work that is out there through open source photos, stock photos, images, that AI is ostensibly pulling from them. How many of those people are going to start losing out? How is that industry, do you think, is going to be effective?
00:25:51
Speaker
and the Ed Sheeran effect of it all, how much can you really parse a picture of a daisy versus a picture of a daisy? I think that area is going to be reinvented, it has to be. That's not AI-breaking marketing, that's AI-breaking business model.
00:26:18
Speaker
And it's not just the specific category of creators you've talked about, right? It's writers, it's a lot of different things. And so what I see, take the future view, what I see the next chapter after the syndrome effect chapter being is what I'll call the Pixar phase.
00:26:45
Speaker
Pixar is, to me, I'm just such a fan of Pixar. In my opinion, you think about their success back in the day, maybe not so much anymore, but when they got started, it wasn't their cutting edge technology that made them special, it was their storytelling. Absolute incredible storytellers.
00:27:09
Speaker
I think the future after this, when everything's leveled out, where we'll be is we'll have unlimited content, like I said. No one will be able to tell what's real and what's not real.
00:27:25
Speaker
Today we can, as we said, from a real practical standpoint, you have to be really careful. You risk the stock footage effect, or the clipart effect is what's happening now. People look at what they can do. I believe that's going to go away on the path it's going. Just like I'd say CGI over the last 30 years,
00:27:48
Speaker
It's not still not perfect, but it's gotten the point where I no longer can right away say, oh yeah, well that's clearly CGI in a movie, right? That's where we're going to end up with all that content I talked about.
00:28:00
Speaker
this conversation, you were joking earlier Trig, but you could be your bot, your butler will be just like as real as you are. My robot butler is considerably more consistently funny than I am. Well, I say, and to be serious about that, your robot butler will be exactly as funny as you are, right? It will become really, really close to you. So in that world, we as consumers and as human beings,
00:28:30
Speaker
won't be able to know if I'm interacting with somebody and I'm not, at least as far as I know, if I'm face to face, I'll still know. For now, I can't see a case that's not the case. But other than that, if there's a wire between us of some kind, I don't think we'll be able to tell, right? And what does that mean to the world? And then finally, this is back to your point about the businesses going, industries going away.
00:28:58
Speaker
In my example about the 700 customer support people, intelligence will be free. I will have an AI team, employees, a company, thousands of employees, and they will do work for me.
00:29:22
Speaker
So what does that do to our model? I really can't fathom what all that means. I think nobody can. But what it does tell me about marketing, let's just dial it back. I think the opportunity for businesses with their marketing that they need to start thinking about now, and if they do, they will have an advantage, is this Pixar world. And at the end of the day, what it comes down to is, it's back to that meaning thing.
00:29:51
Speaker
you have to find your way to communicate your authenticity through this artificial world. And I don't know what that is yet. It's probably something new. One thing it is that we know today is there will be a high, I believe there will be a higher value on face-to-face meetings than there has been. There'll be a reversion back. And you can't scale that and you'll never be able to.
00:30:17
Speaker
But that will be an opportunity for marketers to find a way, how do I leverage in-person meetings and events in a different way? Because that is that one place where, as a consumer, as a business person, I know that's a real human, and I could have that authenticity, unaugmented. So that's for sure something that you can do. But I think this is back to the original thing. Invest in AI now. Be fluent.
00:30:46
Speaker
understand what's coming, get to know what it can do, what it can't do, what it's just learned to do, where its strengths are, where its weaknesses are, how people react to it. Because that knowledge, that experience is going to be how you will find your way to be human in this weird world.
00:31:12
Speaker
Peter, are you familiar with the history of Pixar as a company? Because you mentioned Pixar twice and talked about evocative storytelling, which I think is great. You know the story of it. I know something about it. Tell me what you mean. So it's a very apt.
00:31:28
Speaker
pull on your part to bring it into the conversation because for the majority of the 90s, the movies were accidental. Pixar was actually a software company that was developed to, I'm probably going to get this wrong, but in my head, it was something to compete with CAD drawings and it was an easier and quicker way to make CAD drawings. Got it. And they made animated things to show the technology. It wasn't the use of the technology. Interesting.
00:31:58
Speaker
And so then they accidentally won the Oscar. And so Steve Jobs was actually one of the original investors in that and he hated the movies and he thought the movies were stupid because he thought the technologies were the right way. But all of a sudden then they kept winning awards and putting out movies and all of a sudden the movie studio became bigger than anything else. It was inevitable that
00:32:21
Speaker
it was going to sort of take over. I'm glad you shared that perspective because it totally makes the point, doesn't it? I think the lesson to be learned there is what you intend the technology for isn't necessarily what it's best for.
00:32:39
Speaker
That's for sure a message. The other thing I heard, Trig, was at the end of the day, meaning trumps technology, right? Pixar started with technology and the meaning grew beyond it.
00:32:56
Speaker
It's funny you mentioned that because one of my favorite books and one that I actually had my son read as a summer extra credit book report, and I'm not actually that nerdy for the kids' education, but he was bored and I was like, okay, I'll give you 50 bucks per book if you do these.
Storytelling vs. AI Noise in Marketing
00:33:15
Speaker
50 bucks? Yeah. Well, it was a beefy book. I'll read for 40. But Ed Catmull, who was the CEO of Pixar,
00:33:24
Speaker
Create or had a book ten years ago called creativity Inc and I haven't read it. I want to oh my goodness It's it's a super easy and an engaging read. But what he got into was the birth of
00:33:39
Speaker
how pixar became a story oriented organization versus attack organizations and so i think that's really important to think about the as we talked about authenticity we've talked about making sure that you're clear we've talked about kinda,
00:33:55
Speaker
We said it in a different way, but the photocopy effects and for the younger folks on the call or listening along, photocopy is this thing where you used to put paper, which is a wood-based product onto a machine and it would reproduce it. If you do that over and over again, it gets fuzzier and fuzzier. That's one of the problems with AI in general is that all AI can do is look at what has been
00:34:22
Speaker
and create its own copy of it. We're going to see a lot more noise inside of that space and we're probably also going to see unforeseen consequences because the AI, the large language models are going to make leaps that
00:34:40
Speaker
we didn't intend and that probably aren't authentic to what we're trying to do in marketing. And so one of the key skills, I think, and I am just bringing this up as a conversation point, but one of the key skills I think is to know
00:34:55
Speaker
and to be able to hang on to the thread of the story of your company. And that's one of the skills that we're going to need to sharpen because the noise is going to keep getting louder. And so we as marketing professionals need to be able to capture that, you know, the winds are getting stronger. We still need to be able to sail in the right direction. Yes, I totally agree, Dave.
00:35:21
Speaker
So for that, and I think as we've gone through the three phases, Pete, right? So from the incredible space to the syndrome phase and now into, you know, what do we do with it all? The key for me, and I think as we figure this out for immediate future, and I'm on stage talking about this and getting huge questions from people all the time on it, so I'm thinking about it a ton right now. The thread is,
00:35:50
Speaker
What do you do now to make sure that you're successful into the future and to start being just cautious, wary, prepared? We don't want to be digital preppers where we've got cans of soup in our basement, but how do we guard and make sure that we're using the tools without losing the soul of our marketing?
00:36:15
Speaker
In my two cents on that, it's somewhat back to basics, but there are some core truths about marketing that are what, no matter what fancy stuff you see around in the current decade we're living in, it goes back to those universal truths. And that's the foundation that is gonna help you to stay grounded through the storm. Those include things we've already talked about like,
00:36:45
Speaker
You can say it's brand related things. What is your company's true story? What is your core truth? And you need to, you need to have it, um, make sure you know it, have it clearly defined, simply defined and have that remain as your gold standard. And so whatever you're creating with whatever amazing technology has to be in support of that story.
00:37:15
Speaker
I think that's the temptation that people, as you said, are going to have a problem with. The lesson for them is,
00:37:26
Speaker
take time regularly to reflect on how all of your messaging, all of your content relates to your core story. And if it doesn't, then you need to clean it up. An example is in today's world is it's people that aren't maybe don't have an
00:37:47
Speaker
had a lot of experience with marketing. If you go to their website, you'll see a lot of different fonts and different image sizes and different even voices and tones. For some people, they don't understand the importance of that comprehensive thing. But the visual identity and the tone consistency
00:38:12
Speaker
of company is how people get to know you. Because if I am a prospect for you and your business, and I just in my work life happen upon a blog post or happen upon an article or happen upon your website. And every time I do, I'm hearing or reading or seeing something a little different.
00:38:35
Speaker
I get confused and I'm too busy to make sense of that conflict. It all averages out and I don't know who you are, but I'm not interested, frankly. The same with this content flood. Even if you're not able to keep up with all the volume, that's okay.
00:39:00
Speaker
It's better that whatever you do create and however you do create it, you just prioritize having it be tied to that meaning, that universal truth.
00:39:13
Speaker
The other thing I'll say is, I think a really good best practice right now for people is to lean into the platforms you're using and the AI that they're investing in their tools for you. For me, HubSpot comes to mind. I'm a big HubSpot fan. I know you guys are too. But all of the CRMs are doing that, Microsoft Office and Copilot, Google and Gemini.
00:39:42
Speaker
They're doing some of that learning work for you, right? Where yes, I hope you do go to chat GPT and you work on your prompts. But what's happening is that's getting aggregated for you as a consumer, as a user. And so that's a really important place for you to tell. That's a power tool for your business. So don't just focus on getting good at prompting.
00:40:06
Speaker
focus on your work process and your habits and your training with the tools that your business is using today. Because all those businesses are making those changes as we speak. Yeah, I think it's exactly to that point, Pete. I think it's not getting good at prompting or using the tools. It's getting good at
00:40:28
Speaker
sharpening and adding back in the soul into the connection or the marketing or reclaiming the thread of whatever you were trying to do.
00:40:41
Speaker
power like what AI is doing. And if you've not played with, you know, just going into chat GPT and having it, you know, draft you a blog post, it's impressive at first, but then it's also really dumb. Yeah. So, you know, it's, I joke and I say, you know, it's my,
00:41:01
Speaker
My kids are a little older now, but it's like a chat GPT or a Gemini blog post is a lot like what you would probably see if you asked your seventh grader to write a book report. You know, it's like, okay, well give me a, give me a book report on
00:41:16
Speaker
cookies. And what it's going to say is, you know, cookies are really neat. And they were invented in 1912 by this company called Bob's Cookies House or whatever. And cookies are really important because cookies are rounds and cookies, cookies, cookies, cookies, cookies. Filling the space with junk that counts as words. So,
00:41:41
Speaker
as a marketer and again as marketing's job is to influence opinion and action. So the only way to do that is by connecting with what your customers actually need. And if you're generating a massive amount of noise, it's easy to get sucked into that and think that it's the end product. But you really need to keep coming back to the purpose of your marketing and what your company's trying to do.
00:42:10
Speaker
And that's the key skill, in my opinion, on what AI practitioners or AI-enabled practitioners need to be comfortable with. Agreed. That's a great point, Dave. There, Trippie, hit the board again.
00:42:27
Speaker
Don't lose sight of your job. David, your job is not to generate words and images. Your job is to, as you said, influence, inspire, and change. I had a conversation earlier this week with somebody who wanted to put me through my paces and asked me 112 questions about capabilities, and can we do this, and can we do this, and can we do this? After about two questions, I said, okay, look, I'll be honest with you,
00:42:57
Speaker
The answer to all your questions is going to be yes. That's not really what you want to ask though. The question is not can it? The question is should it? And when you deal with all of these tools that can do all of these wonderful things that in an ideal world should accelerate your efforts, the question is should you? And what's the cost of losing that?
00:43:22
Speaker
losing your authenticity. And that's something that everybody needs to try and figure out on their own. I think, similarly, and I think we've all sort of experienced this, and this is when we're recording this, this was the day after the Department of Justice sued Apple, but traditionally what you see when you see non-Apple phones come out is the company will tell, say, we do this one thing better than the Apple phone. So you should buy our phone. It's like, well,
00:43:51
Speaker
Isn't the converse of that that the Apple phone does like 50 things better than you do, but you just do that one thing better? So just because it can, I think marketing on the whole has a shiny tool syndrome. And I think Dave and I are very guilty of that compared to anybody else. Dave and I are often the people who are like, hey, look at this. And the people who work with us are like, shh, go back to your desk.
00:44:20
Speaker
I work with CEOs that don't have a marketing leader and the core problem from almost every one of them is that there are thousands of choices they have for marketing in the marketing world. How the heck can they decide the right thing to do?
00:44:39
Speaker
That's really what my business is about, is that curating and choosing the right things, the right one out of thousands to help their business. Trig, you're totally right. That's what we're talking about here with AI. It's an abundance problem. You can do anything you want, and that's a problem.
00:45:03
Speaker
Well, it's the same thing like you could, if you really want a nice long read, just Google SEO.
00:45:10
Speaker
companies and you'll get several million results. You can do the same thing by trying to generate content and put all that together. Just because it's easier doesn't mean it's better. Just because there's more doesn't mean it's better. I want to do a quick callback to your book, Pete, on purpose because I think that's a really cogent
00:45:38
Speaker
outline of what you need to know if you're going to actually connect as a company and as a business owner.
Concise Content in the AI Era
00:45:46
Speaker
It's been interesting for me to see that this whole AI topic, it applies to that very much. There's not a change needed to say, how do you look at that? I will say here's one practical piece of advice for your audience out there.
00:46:08
Speaker
what you can do today is as you're creating content, I'm a big believer in content. Despite what I said, there's going to be a lot. It's still really important. One opportunity people have right now as we go from the supers phase to the syndrome phase, it's just starting like the SEO keyword stuff is starting to change because of what's going on. And it's going to, as this, this content flood is coming,
00:46:34
Speaker
An opportunity for people is to create things that make it easier for their clients to consume information. So think less rather than more. Think of a guide to a very tight list that helps them from your expertise. Again, something they can't just go ask chat GPT that helps them have to read less, have to dig less,
00:47:04
Speaker
sort through a flood less. That's a great topic of whatever your subject matter is, look for ways to make it easier for your clients to learn or absorb or a shortcut for them because we all are going to be wanting help with that. This is all fine and good, but the real secret of marketing is that what you say doesn't matter, it's when they want to hear it.
00:47:33
Speaker
and timing is everything. Absolutely. Pete, we can't thank you enough for joining us again. Where can people find you online? Great place to find me is on LinkedIn. It's just my name, easy enough. My website is b2b-clarity.com. The company is B2B Clarity. I have some free resources out there for CEOs without a marketing leader that they go out and look for.
00:48:03
Speaker
Absolutely. Thank you Pete. So great to see ya. Thanks guys.