Watch the YouTube video version above or listen to the podcast below!

Summary

AI and Content Creation: The New Frontier

The integration of AI in content creation stands as a pivotal topic. Ruthi Corcoran highlights the shift towards more interactive learning and information digestion methods, stating, "GPTs are a much more interactive way of learning, of digesting information." This transition promises to redefine how content is created and consumed, emphasizing the need for a balance between digital interaction and the traditional depth of content.

eBooks and Traditional Publishing: An Evolving Landscape

Dougherty reflects on the changing nature of eBooks and traditional publishing in the face of AI advancements. He draws an analogy with the industrialization of food, suggesting that while AI-generated content may satisfy many, there remains a segment that prefers the 'organic', traditional methods, underscoring the diverse preferences in content consumption.

Legal and Ethical Considerations of AI

Alex Pokorny brings to light the legal and ethical challenges posed by AI in marketing. He remarks, "AI in marketing isn't just about efficiency; it's about creating more meaningful and personalized consumer interactions." This aspect of AI necessitates a careful consideration of its ethical implications, particularly in terms of content ownership and authenticity.

AI’s Role in Future Consumer Interactions

The hosts also explore how AI might shape future consumer interactions. Dougherty notes, "As AI becomes more integrated into our lives, the challenge will be in maintaining authenticity and depth in content." This statement highlights the importance of balancing technological advancement with the preservation of genuine human elements in marketing and content creation.

The Future of AI in Marketing

In discussing the future, the hosts predict a continued integration of AI tools in business, shaping not just efficiency but also the nature of consumer interactions. They foresee AI as a tool that will not only streamline processes but also enhance the human experience in the digital realm.

Episode 19 - GPTs and 2024 Marketing & AI Predictions Video and Podcast Transcript

[Disclaimer: This transcription was written by AI using a tool called Descript, and has not been edited for content.]

Dave Dougherty: Welcome to the latest episode of Enterprising Minds. The whole crew is here. Alex Ruthy and Dave. We are going to touch on a topic that everybody's talking about already. So we'll lend our voices to that, which is AI's, GPT's announcement from their, their Dev Day. And then talk about 2024 predictions. Just for fun.

And I think it could be fun if we come back next year to see how good or bad our predictions were, and, you know, why not be a glutton for punishment? So first things first, new feature try out. I just want to make sure zoom, um, a while ago has said that they're going to do an AI smart summary tool.

We have yet to try it out in our processes. So if you guys are okay, we can try that out and I can turn that on for

okay. So for anybody,

Ruthi Corcoran: what does it do?

Dave Dougherty: Well, let me read the window that just popped up. Meeting summary with a companion is now on. The meeting summary uses AI technology, which includes 3rd party models. Zoom does not use any audio video chat screen sharing attachments or any communications like content, such as poll results, whiteboard and reactions to train zooms or 3rd parties.

AI models will send the meeting summary to invitees after the meeting ends. Based on the settings configured for this meeting, anyone who receives the meeting summary may save and share it with apps and others. The account owner has access to the meeting summary. AI generated content may be inaccurate, misleading, and always check for accuracy, pressing got it button um, to signal that I understand.

Alex Pokorny: You can leave meeting and run away from the AI revolution.

Dave Dougherty: So essentially what it, what it does my understanding of it is that it listens to our conversation. It creates a transcript of said conversation. And then at the end of the meeting, we'll email either the. Meeting hosts or the attendees, again, depending on the settings a summary of the meeting.

So it will be like basically who is in attendance, who said what main topics and then kind of elaborates on that. So I've heard of other podcasts testing it out to see if it's a good way to Get a summary of episode recordings and then do like a summary blog post from that content where, you know, you might add a bit of color or formatting changes.

But for the most part, you know, a summary blog of the episode and why you should listen to it is pretty much written for you based on the conversations you have naturally. So just be a fun thing to test out and see. You know, I know, but before we hit the record button, we were commenting on how just impossibly hard it feels to stay on top of everything that's happening with.

With AI and all the different announcements. So, you know, Ruthie, why don't you why don't you kick us off with um, we were talking about before.

Ruthi Corcoran: Yeah, that's right. First, hold on to your zoom summary. We're going to come back to that with 2024 predictions because I've got some thoughts and teaser on copilot as well.

Okay, I'll take eBooks are out GPTs are the new thing, by which I mean, check out my chat bot. And this could be true of podcasts, maybe podcasts are out too. But I think people like listening in the background. I think that's sort of a different ballgame. But seeing as eBooks are more of a reading based interface.

I think that whereas in the past, people have done eBooks and you download the eBook. Instead, it's going to be. Some variation on interface with my, my GPT um, as the way that we interact with either content creators, brands, et cetera. It's going to be a slightly different model, right? You don't need to download necessarily a a chatbot.

Maybe you just get access to it. That's that's sort of my hot take. I don't know how much time people are going to want to spend on eBooks, let alone, you know, published. Paper books when GPT is a much more interactive way of learning of digesting information and bonus with voice you can listen to it and talk to it as well as read and type.

Dave Dougherty: So I definitely have some thoughts if you're. If that's your premise, fire away. Okay. Okay. I

I'm going to yes. And you instead of yeah, but as part of my continual evolution as a human being, I think it will. Be that way for a certain portion of people who enjoy interacting digitally. I think it makes sense for people who are creating a lot of content, who have an audience, who are already interested in interacting with them.

I don't think it would be good for audience building. And I also think that I forget which episode we talked about it, but I, I remember equating AI earlier in 2023 to the industrialization of food and how it will be good enough for a lot of people, but for the people who really care and the people who want to have a good experience or want to be healthier um, they will go with the.

organic, they will go with the slow, hard things to do. The more traditional ways of doing things because either a, it'll be a more enjoyable experience. They learn better that way, right? Different methods of learning are better for different types of people. But then also just the experience of having a physical book uh, and the intention behind that I think allows for people to learn more deeply.

Like, I even did this recently with I finally bit the bullet and became a subscriber of Harvard Business Review. And I did it because I kept bumping up on the article limits digitally. But then I realized I am more likely to read this if I have a physical thing. So I also subscribed to the physical magazine.

And I have to tell you, getting a glossy magazine in the mail, other than the really crappy community coupon books It's actually a really nice experience that I think a lot of people are forgetting about. It's nice to receive mail that actually means something to you and not the like, please send money things that you always get.

And being able to sit down and focus on an article, put it down, you know, walk away. And just have it be the thing that I did for a little bit is it's just a much better experience than, you know, what I can do online digitally of, I can take an article and have it summarized via AI and I can get all of the perfect little points, right.

But I don't have a depth of understanding. I haven't mulled around the ideas very much. I have only just gotten that surface level interpretation of whatever the content was.

So I think ebooks will be an important signal for other things. Right. You might be able to get more audience. It's a statement of at this particular moment in time, these are my ideas on this particular subject. Right. You're more likely to evolve. One would hope the longer you stay in a, in a field. But then it also unlocks other things.

Like if you release a book as a consultant, you're able to get better speaking gigs. You'll be able to get you know, see, be seen as more of an authority because you actually took the time. To sit down and say, this is something I stand for. This is what I think on these particular topics. Here are the examples I'm pulling in and it allows you these secondary benefits where if you have a GPT.

I'm not creating a relationship with you. Yes. I'm getting the information, but how do you differentiate one person's GPT over another when it's in a sea of online app stores basically? And yeah, anyway, I can keep ranting, but I don't, I don't see it replacing other things. I think it only helps the people who already have an audience interact with that audience who want.

mOre information from the person that they like

Alex, your turn or Ruthie rebuttal. That's, you

Alex Pokorny: know, go for it.

Ruthi Corcoran: Oh, I've got a whole bunch. It's more of a springboard. It's not even a rebuttal. It's like a. You know, I love that out as sort of a provocative statement just to just to think about because we've been talking about it ourselves. Like, what's the role of ebooks going forward?

What is the role of these new chat type? I use that as shorthand, right? The, I have an, I have some sort of chat bot that you can talk to and you can sort of interact with an author rather than reading their book as an example of one way you might interact with the technology. But I think Dave, you bring up some really good points.

And what it makes me think of is these, this new way of interacting is entering an ecosystem of blogs of short videos of, of just basic search of web pages. And when each of those new things, when blogs came out, people didn't stop reading books. They kept reading books. And I think what happens is it, it crowds out where the, the new technology does better.

Right? Blogs is much more at like. Quick short form stuff than books ever would be. So you maybe have fewer pamphlets, say, because now you can just go read a long form article blog. So it crowds out in the spaces where it does better, but then it allows the remaining mediums to do more of what they do in that sort of niche space.

So I think it's going to be an end to your point. I think all of these different ways of interacting with AI chats are going to be additive. And they're going to find their niche and you'll interact with them. In addition to all the other mediums and where and how you interact with the different mediums might depend on the subject matter

Alex Pokorny: because of brand or content creator, there's been a reliance on AI just to take your same content and create it in that many different formats.

I was just thinking about the pain that any, you know, social media influencer has right now. You have to have a short form for YouTube shorts, a long form to basically get better ad revenue. You want to do a TikTok, then you're doing Stitch with those. So then you're constantly finding other people to then, you know.

Take team basically create partnerships or work off of their content and their kind of virality and then you're creating the next piece of content the next and the next and the next and it's like even as I mean think of like a self published author to continue that you know that role that's a lot of content when they're supposed to be writing the next the sequel to the book that's a lot to create

Dave Dougherty: Well, and I saw a thing on LinkedIn and I, I, you know, apologies.

I forget who, who it was. It wasn't an immediate connection of mine, but somebody who was commented on it. They were somebody who wrote a book on a marketing topic. And they uploaded that book into the GPT. Then they uploaded all of their blogs and social posts that they did previously and they created it.

And then, but while they were doing it, they realized anybody else could take any of my content and upload it and create one of these GPTs under my name. There are no guardrails around. Do you own this content that you are training this bot on? So there's going to like all of these things where it's like, if you were to take somebody else's work and then create something off of that, now, granted there's fair use, there's there are all these exceptions for education, but fundamentally it's like stealing ideas and other content.

If you, you know, if I was to take like a Scott Galloway book and then incorporate that into my GPT, that is technically infringement, right? Because I'm claiming that as my own, by promoting out this, this GPT that uses this other content.

Alex Pokorny: That's difficult because you're talking about source material as well.

It could be Dave's ultimate marketing GPT, which has tons of different authors, works uploaded. As long as you're citing your sources saying, well, Scott Galloway says, you could probably find a lines or ways around any of those problems. But, and then will Scott Galloway get a percentage of some sort of profits if you were to have some sort of paywall of, I don't know, membership, you name it.

No, not with the current legal setup. Yeah, now with that set up, I mean, they would just be noted and remarked upon, but then again,

Dave Dougherty: you get a massive list of cease and desist letters from any of the writer's guilds. And, you know, if you're discovered, right, but that's only going to happen to the most successful GPTs when they find out that, Oh, Hey, my source material is in this, that, and the other, like, you know, the authors that are suing open AI right now under the class action.

So

Alex Pokorny: what's the line there between basically a marketing textbook? This is just the interactive version of a marketing textbook and they're citing a long set of sources if you, you know, ask for it. If you were to retake, I mean, rename all of their content and say, this is Dave's words and only Dave's words.

Dave Dougherty: I'm not sure there is the citing piece within the GPTs. If there is, that's a great step. And I like that. If it isn't, it's just more of the bad content of people stealing blog posts from people because it's out in public and they think they can. Yeah, I mean, there's, there's a certain culture within the, you know, the internet space where like stealing is okay and they're happy about it.

And they'll even like contact the content creator to say, Hey, look what I did with all of your content. And it's like, seriously, talk to my lawyer. Like, you know, Paul Reutzer of the Marketing AI Institute talked about on their most recent podcast about how, you know, people have actually done this with him and his content.

They've taken the blog posts and the podcasts and everything else and they, you know, repackaged it under something else and then sent them, sent him a link to the stuff as if he would be happy that they stole his ideas.

Alex Pokorny: I've been seeing that more and more on TikTok, Instagram, with reels and shorts of straight up somebody else from that same platform's content.

Not reposting it, not linking to it, not kind of give any credit whatsoever, but instead saying it's their own. I mean, they'll crop out basically the person's face or something, and the camera angle looks a little odd the entire time. Stuff like that. It's like, come on. Yeah, I don't know how far that goes.

Let's move to Ruthie unless you have a point right on.

Ruthi Corcoran: I want to run in a slightly different direction, not on this, which is a bit on the depressing side. And I so appreciate you guys think about these things because I'm just like, Oh, just do it. It'll be great. You guys are like, wait, but people in the internet aren't always great.

Here's a question, because to me, a lot of, a lot of these, like, an enterprising GPT bot, I don't even have the right language yet, guys, I'm working on it. Is not an if, but a when. And so my question to you guys is like, under what conditions would we set that up? Like, where would it make sense for us to set one up for, for this, this activity that we're doing right here?

Dave Dougherty: So

uh, in 1 of the podcasts I was listening to this morning when I was getting ready for the day. The person interviewing or being interviewed about the GPT announcement said, you know what the, the GPT piece is really, it's reframing what people typically call agents. Right? So if you create something that is supposed to do a specific task for you, like chatbots in their traditional sense, you know, this is something that we've been doing with company content for a lot of years for the customer service chatbots.

Here's our, here's our web structure, crawl our web structure to find all the content to assist with the, you know, customer questions here, all the FAQs we've ever created, you know digest that and, and have that ready to go so that you can help out the customers. Here's phone logs and transcripts from, you know, all of that.

We've been doing this for years for that very tiny specific thing. But now we're blowing it out to also creating the demand generation content, creating, you know, content that's supposed to represent you as a personal brand or your company as a, you know, institution, that's where it gets really dicey.

And that's where you start getting that, that liability piece because it's no longer just your content. It is now everybody's content. And. You know, as much as people want to believe in, you know, Wikipedia, is this like one source of truth? No, it's not because people are constantly editing it. They're constantly hijacking profiles.

And there's a lot of people doing a lot of work to try to keep it this nice kind of pure thing, but it's just, it's an arms race and it's not. A single source of truth. It is a singular. It's a source of truth, but not the right. Yeah, I don't know. Clearly, I'm still processing it and trying to figure it out.

I think all of us are, but I tend to be. I'm trying to cut through the hype around it. And so much of the tech bro stuff, whereas this is going to be like the best thing ever. And it's going to be amazing. And like, really? Cause Google glass sucked. Like, you know, and everybody was stoked about that too. Yeah.

Alex Pokorny: Yeah. I could just throw one different example in there. I was just thinking of all the, the Wikias and. You know, kind of the side ones that are made for different fandoms. So if you want to know what Chewbacca's, you know, race and where, what planet he's from, you could create a Star Wars wiki or Star Wars GPT, and you could ask it requests, see what it is.

Dave Dougherty: Isn't it? Yeah, there's a walker for

Alex Pokorny: that. Yeah.

Dave Dougherty: I don't know why, but there's a,

Alex Pokorny: but there's a very ad covered experience for just about any TV show fandom out there that exists. And those experiences aren't very good. I mean, we've, we've talked before about like recipe blogs, most of your blogs are awful and they have been for over 10 years, like literally that format of ad covered.

I first made an apple pie when my grandmother came over. I don't care. Give me that. Well, my recipe, I mean, like what on earth is all these ads and pop ups that are trying to cover just the simple ingredients and the like the three steps I need to know, like, come on, that experience has not changed. So if we could update any of those experiences to something a little bit better, I think you're going to see a population shift over to that.

The other thing I was thinking about during this whole thing to take a little bit of a twist in this conversation is also what does the audience request and require. The holiday season's kicking off and I've been looking for some unique gifts, and I can't tell you how often I've come across the exact same gift from, I can't tell you how many different places that say it's their unique thing, which it isn't, which it's like a table side tented piece of wood that you put your book over so it holds the page.

I don't know why, but that seems to be a popular gift right now, and my gosh, they're all over. And I was just thinking back to, okay, how many people do I know who really like reading paper books versus a Kindle and are reading books versus scrolling on Tic Tac or, you know, Twitter, LinkedIn, whatever, you know, source of news, newsletters that they prefer.

And getting down to this, there's a certain population that will continue to follow and require paperback books. And there was a population who is really going to love ebooks. And there's a population who is really going to get into, you know, GPTs. So we're creating content again for these different audiences, but I think these audiences will persist and continue to exist.

I mean, maybe we're talking about 2024 predictions here, but I don't think ebooks are dead. I was looking at this step because I was trying to figure out exactly the date and number, but Amazon, they put a limit on how many ebooks you can upload as an author per day. thIs was in September of 2023, here, September 18th, and they've limited, so now you can only upload three a day.

you're an author and you're uploading three new books, three new eBooks every single day. And that was because of the, the giant, you know, amazing amount that has now been created with ai. And some author threw their name on it and created an ebook because. Fast way to get that content out with their name on it, but this is the next piece.

Why would Amazon do that? Why would they want a flood of eBooks? I mean, that sounds like a terrible thing to deal with, but they're a marketplace. So there has to be an audience. a purchasing, paying for audience who is interested in this explosion of content and says, yes, finally my random niche, I finally have a book for this or my random interest.

I finally have a book that tells me something that I'm interested in, in a certain way, or I'll finally figure out what would be like if George Washington, Abraham Lincoln were brothers and this random story, which speaking of GPTs, that was one other example I was thinking about for over a year now, there's been historical.

AI systems, which basically then you can pick, you can talk to Gandhi and have a conversation with Gandhi. All it is is basically as a prompt that someone has used and basically placed over GPT and you're really responding through that system, but you're able to have these conversations. You know, what would Jean Luc Picard say about my current work workplace issue?

You know, I could, I could ask Picard what he thinks and then have Worf go after them or something. I don't know, you know, you can play around with that.

Dave Dougherty: That has always been true of the internet though. There are some wonderful things that people create that on the face of them are totally useless other than, oh my God, I can't believe this exists. Thank you to whoever made this exist, but that's usually where it stops. Right? I mean, there's no, like, repeat purchase.

There's no, sometimes.

Alex Pokorny: It depends. And there's one... This was this was from years ago. And they published a ton of them. It was a list of romance novels between dinosaurs and people. And there was sequel after sequel after sequel being published and it was became like an internet meme because you're like no way and these covers were just hilarious the standard romance cover except there's like a velociraptor there and you're thinking this this can't exist and then you realize that there's like dozens of these things because there's an audience somewhere that must be purchasing this and really interested in this or an author who is just diehard of saying the world needs my content and is really after it I mean There is a weird niche all over the place.

I mean, think of like the sub genres of any music style. There is a ridiculous number of sub genres, and they are continuing to be created every year.

Dave Dougherty: The three years ago, I think? Dee Snider, the lead singer from Twisted Sister, released a solo record that was produced and all the songs were written by like Jamie Josta and some of the Hatebreed guys.

So it's this like super East coast punk metal sound with Dee Snider singing on top of it. And it's that perfect example of, okay, I like the songwriters who are a part of this project. I'm going to check it out. It's a little kitschy that it's D Snyder on top of it, but oh my God, I didn't know I needed that record.

That record is so good. It was completely the surprise of the year where I'm like, all right, everybody's going to laugh, but you need to check out this record because it was so over the top. And I think the first single was, you know, for the love of metal. And it was just like eighties hair metal, but And you're like, I don't want to admit I love this, but it is just absolutely something I need in my life.

Alex Pokorny: So you get this explosion of content, which allowed that to happen. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, I was trying to think of the popular song, but. It was from an EDM artist, but he decided to go with a country beat. And some people asked him like, why? Like, that's just kind of an odd choice for your current crowd.

And his response was that was the way to cut through the crowd, because I was basically looking at what have everyone else done? What have they produced? What have they used and sampled? And the thing that really was missing was country. And as it turned out, his blend of music plus the country beat to it worked really, really well and became a top single.

Like it was a weird thing, but it was. It was caused by this explosion of content and somebody then taking a unique perspective, a little tilted perspective and saying, you know, how do I cut through this and do something a little bit different? And they found a crowd. I wouldn't have expected it, but they found a crowd.

So I don't know. I mean, GPTs, eBooks, all these different things, all these different publishing methods or content methods. If there's an audience, then I, then I guess it works. I mean, I'm taking an oddly like straight capitalistic capitalism view on this, but They're selling it. It's working. People are buying.

Dave Dougherty: The other thing that it makes me think of, not just like the industrialization of food, right, but also if you look at what happened with Napster and the purchasing of music with like the industry As well as the simultaneous gains in technology where you no longer needed a studio, like a studio that you rent out at 300 an hour, right?

You have a studio at your home and it's now good enough that you can make, you know, album quality demos from your house. Those two things I feel like are really good descriptions of what's going on now. With a GPT thing, right? It will become possible for everybody to code or to release their own chat bot.

But just because you have the tools, right, doesn't mean you're actually going to do the thing or see it to the finish line. Right?

Ruthi Corcoran: And it's having the hundreds of thousands, millions of people all taking their different variation of, oh, I've got an idea. Let's make a chap out of this thing from which I suspect.

Will emerge. Here's what these things are really good at. And here's the value. Ed,

Alex Pokorny: you mark it. I had an interesting interview. They're going through some data points about chatbots and people's perspectives on them. And really they scored well in one area and it was immediacy. People love the fact that they're available 24 seven.

Overall, they're not very satisfied, but if they have a very simple query, really simple question, it's a great way to basically sort through the website or the terms and conditions or return policy or whatever it is. To give them that little piece of information that they're looking for and be on their way.

So, thinking about like from a funnel statement, like that's probably a good majority of people who have just a quick question of, Do you have a 30, 60, 90 day policy, return policy? Because I realize it's been a month and I need to return this. Like, how often does that come up to a retail store? Probably pretty frequently.

Like little questions like that, that people are searching, googling. Just giving the quick answer. I get that. And I definitely, I mean, that's actually one of my predictions was basically the improvement of chatbots. And just, I really think that that, as those systems get better, it's a two part piece.

And I think that's even a, that could be a limitation of the GPTs as well. The second piece is source data. Do you have source data that's cleaned up, available, parsed out well enough? Is this random copies of some random book, a booklet that somebody then tried to make a PDF out of, and then they uploaded a really crappy resolution.

And if you got a whole library of those. That's not exactly great when you're trying to somehow take that content and then turn it into a chatbot. So there's that two part piece of do you have the content? Do you have it in a readily available format that the bot can then turn around and use? And what those requirements are and training people.

To get their content in order or to use other systems, OCR systems, text recognition systems, you name it, to be able to like pull and grab that copy and get it in that state. That is a piece of education. I don't think it's out there yet of what does it take to make a good chat bot? Well, it takes great content that you need to have.

What does that mean? That's a good question, and I, I think that that's the next stage with the chatbots is basically is the, the company education, the source material education that needs to happen.

Dave Dougherty: And that, that's a good point because I feel like, you know, Microsoft is a great example of this with Excel and Word and all that.

You release all these features. Yeah. Right. But half the time you don't. Know how to use them because all you're trying to do is figure out how to make the cell red. Yeah. I Just need a square. I don't need anything else, you know, where you know, you see some of these like the Excel Olympics or whatever it is where they have the competitions of formatting and like Like so on the one hand Wow Like it's, it's always cool to see somebody really good at what it is.

They do on the other hand. Oh my God. That's all you do every day in and out. Like what? I don't understand that because it's so far from how I choose to live my life and what I find interesting.

With the proliferation of content, though, I do feel like it just exacerbates the problem that we already have with getting ideas out and building an audience, right? It drives people toward what is already successful to trusted names already. And, you know, you look at like, okay, why would I release a book over a GPT thing?

You know, I mentioned a little bit on the top of, okay, you get these secondary effects of, you know, being able to speak at other places or whatever. But if you, if you release a book, you also have a lot of the kind of PR benefits of a book tour, all of the radio interviews, all of the content that's built off of that, right?

Because the radio station is going to be putting out their blog with a link to the, or the interview and the clips from those, Conversations you also get to go, you know, speak at some universities that might want to interview you on on the things that you put out because they might be relevant to a course.

And so you are slowly building that audience through your expertise around a particular topic. You know, and yes, you have to sit and promote your ideas as much as you do create them. Right. I think a lot of people, we don't focus enough on the promotion of the ideas. It's just create a whole bunch of them and then you'll be successful.

And I think, you know all of our conversations in late 22 and 23 has just been create as much shit as possible and hope that it works. Right. But no, you still need to be strategic about it. You still need to have it ladder up into something.

Alex Pokorny: Yeah, there's an interesting divide. I always think of it as an SEO, SEM divide of which direction do you start with?

What's your kind of mental state or baseline theory of if I find the best keyword research, I'm doing this all offline. My audience doesn't know I'm doing it. And I go through all this information and pour through all this data and figure out basically what's going on. You know, journeys throughout my website analytics, you know, response rates, you name it, pull us all together.

I can come up with the content that will have the terms that will somehow attract and become a magnet that was somehow pulling this brand new audience. Then you can reverse that and you just look at from a paid search world and you look at this and say, okay, what can, what do I have that's worthy of promotion that would be worth spending money on?

And how do I basically take this and basically push this in front of this audience in such an engaging way that it will attract them and pull them in? It's such a, you know, such a, I guess it's a little bit of a push and pull sort of dilemma, but yeah, AI is fantastic at creating content. You're absolutely right.

I mean, your book tour happens because you have an agent. You have a PR agent. You have an agent who's helping you schedule all these things. Who's working with you because your job is to write the book and to show up and be a good personality. Your job is not to figure out what bookstores can be available and new work on the day you happen to be there.

But that's what your

Ruthi Corcoran: AI is for, guys.

Alex Pokorny: Agent to help book the book tour

Ruthi Corcoran: didn't land the way I hoped

I want to segue off of you sort of kickstarted it with your prediction for 2024 on the rise of chatbots. Do you want to take the next 1? Otherwise? I will list a couple go for it

Alex Pokorny: here.

Ruthi Corcoran: So I think your Star Wars GPT. I'm going to take a quick. Cheap shot, this wasn't on my list, but I think we're going to see something akin to the dot com era of just the rise of all of these different things, which I think would come as no surprise to any of us.

But 1 thing that it reminds me of, it's sort of, if you take a look around the history of electricity, there was a period in time in which the sort of it new thing and the way to succeed was to add a little bit of electricity to a bunch of things. And I think we sort of saw that a little bit with the Internet of things, or it's like, oh, if you just add a sensor to a bunch of things, like magic happens and.

With the dot com area, it was okay by a website for the thing for the by all the websites. And I suspect we'll see a similar event with, with GPTs and they're like, and I think part of it will be how do you, which one stick right of the hundreds of thousands and millions of different We'll call them GPTs that get released, which ones are effective.

And then also, how do you, how do you filter through all of them? You know, is it a Google search type equivalent that allows you to do some of those things? So that was my cheap shot. Seems to be like, that's just sitting there on the table. Pretty easy. I think the, the 1 that I'm sort of more I want to say sort of more interested in, at least at the moment is I.

Think 2024 will be sort of the rise of AI productivity. So we're starting to see co pilot come out. And it's sort of proliferating through the Microsoft 365 apps, which is pretty cool. There's a lot of little, little, little teeny tiny things where you go. Oh, that's kind of handy. Oh, that's really that's helpful.

Not nothing in your face, not too obvious, but just little teeny tiny things that just make day to day work life a little bit easier. I think the zoom the zoom feature that we talked about at the beginning of the episode, which was admittedly new to me, falls into this category. And I think that this is going to be sort of, they're going to, they're going to sort of come along in the background.

And they'll becomes the new standard of how we do work is being able to use these sort of AI productivity. I don't even want to call them apps, but that's that's the language I have at the moment. And I think a couple of other examples where we're seeing this Dave, you can, of course, talk about the various AI productivity tools in the transcript area.

I saw an eBay. So when you're filling out, when you're selling something on eBay, there's now a little button you can click to help you write the description. So I think those will be sort of just more and more to make the, the mundane tasks that are content creation, but not the exciting kind of content creation a little bit easier.

And the hope of course is that it gets better both to create and to consume. So that's, that's my hot take for 2024 is the rise of AI productivity.

Alex Pokorny: Yeah,

Dave Dougherty: no, I, I, I love geeking out on productivity hacks and, you know, creative processes and stuff. So part of me wants to just kind of fast forward so that we can talk about whether or not it happened.

But anyway, we're in the present, we're here now. Yeah, I, I agree that the the quote unquote entrepreneurs of 2023 that basically, you know, put a wanton wrapper around you know, GPT 3. 5 or four and then sold it as something new I think all of those companies will die. That's my, that's my gimme prediction.

They'll, there'll be a lot of them that just won't be needed. Cause I've even noticed that for me, like one of my takeaways this year was, okay. I signed up for a number of these things because it was just easier. While I was figuring out how to prompt, you know, kind of the new skill of this is how you talk to a large language model to get the result you want, having the shortcuts of a tool that already had those kind of prompts built into the background was extremely helpful, but then I figured out how to do it without.

Which now it completely has voided any of the reason to spend 20 a month with them versus, you know, open AI or anthropic or whatever else. So yeah, getting it straight from the source, I think will be will be a thing. My larger swing for the fences kind of prediction. I think we're going to see both Apple and Google finally announced their.

Language models or they're, you know, so like Gemini with Google to go against open AI and then Apple I know they've been very quiet. And it's dinged them for not having an AI. So it'll be interesting to see what their response is. Because you talk about a captured audience, you know, a lot of Apple users, and I am completely talking about myself here.

Are so ingrained in that ecosystem that if they do launch something that works well and plays nice, that will be an absolute game changer because of people being able to adopt it and use it. Right. You wouldn't have that hurdle of, okay, I need to go create a new account. I need to go do this.

It's no, it's just ingrained. It's already inside of, you know, FaceTime and Siri and, you know, your messages or whatever else, you know with whatever new update. So yeah, those will be my two. I'm sure I'll think of more. But Alex, what's up on your end? One of my

Alex Pokorny: last ones is the continued proliferation of advertising to the point where there is some sort of rejection of it.

So, and I mean, out of home advertising, actually, I mean, digital advertising. Again, eMarketer love a lot of their reporting, especially their daily podcasts. Kind of keeps me informed on a lot of the different kind of marketing news that's out there. But this one's a little old, actually. But it's the one that honestly broke me.

Like there's the straw that I just couldn't take it anymore because it's like this. No, we've gone too far with advertising. It is putting LCDs into the coolers of convenience stores. So as you walk up to the refrigerated unit that contains. The milk pop, whatever, there would be an ad playing on the door as you open it.

And that one, that one got me. That was the one that got me because it was like, no, we, this is too much. I already had a gas pump now and they don't even allow mute anymore on those screens. Have an incessant little, you know, commercial that's playing as I'm filling up my car. And if I walk into the store, there's ads everywhere that are on paper, you know, printed off from different manufacturers or different products, you know, beef jerky, you name it, some sport drink, you name it.

Like there's going to be a lot of advertising that you see within a convenience store, but just that added level of grabbing attention through the interactivity of something that's a digital advertisement versus a physical one, as well as now allowing real estate to then be purchased on that cooler much more easily.

So you could do programmatic solution or worse yet a minority report esque retargeting where you see something that triggers a purchase or something that you can then turn around and create a more personalized advertising advertisement for it. No, I'm done. I'm done. I don't know. There's, there's got to be something that's going to rebel against this and be like, no, we're done.

This is an information overload in a way that is not requested and not wanted.

Dave Dougherty: There's two reactions that I have when you say that one is what took you so long because like 15 years ago, they put the screens above the urinals in those bars so that you know, you're trapped and you have to look at them.

Alex Pokorny: Yeah, right in front of your face. And yeah, so

Dave Dougherty: That's what got me even when I was in high school. I'm like, man, forget this noise. But then also, what are you trying to do in a convenience store with that advertising? You only are reaching for something you know you already want to buy in that situation.

If you can even see it around

Alex Pokorny: the end, you can hope that it's cooler. Yeah.

Dave Dougherty: So, you know, you have to open the door anyway, which nullifies the ad and the ad's not about to convince you to grab something else. Unless two for

Alex Pokorny: four, maybe the orange one, not the green one.

Dave Dougherty: Right. We're out of the, we're out of the red one.

So by the blue,

Alex Pokorny: right.

Ruthi Corcoran: I mean, this is just an extension of the icky recipe websites with all their ads extended into the real world. We're selling eyeballs. That's, that's all it is. And if, if I'm a company who's buying that real estate, well, the more recognition and reminders and familiarity of I have with that customer or potential customer, the more likely they're going to remember and feel good about me in the future because they won't remember.

That was the 1 time that I had that ad that was annoying me. Yeah,

Alex Pokorny: so, okay, here's we'll throw in the BMW advertisement. It's a cheap neighborhood. We'll throw in a cheaper one.

Dave Dougherty: There's a question for both of you as a follow on to that. Yeah, if, if AI makes content massively more easy um, and then advertising is bonkers, which we've known for years.

And that needs to change. Do we start seeing companies take the risk to do heavier lifts and more costly attention campaigns and, you know, consideration things like, will we start seeing more kitty litter five Ks or eBooks on how to care for your pets or, you know, the Red Bull crashed ice kind of things.

Do we see more of those? Because It captures more attention at a single time. It stands out from what everybody else is doing because what everybody else is doing is safe. And you know, you won't get fired for doing a logical decision, right?

I

Alex Pokorny: don't know if it gets smarter. That's, that's the problem that I have because there's an explosion of content, but there's also an explosion of placements that doesn't necessarily actually enforce good content or. You know, tough real estate, for instance, think of the super bowl that's coming up and they just recently sold out all the ads for seven mil pop now for 30 seconds.

Those are exceptionally expensive advertisements. I mean, some companies have put their entire year's budget into one ad and that's. That's it. And those ads have to then be good and they're judged being good or not. And they're right next to a whole bunch of other ones that are pretty good quality. So they're going to be quickly forgotten if they're not interesting or poorly done or poorly executed to some, some degree.

So that makes it difficult. But when you have ads everywhere, that ad placement real estate is cheap. The remnant advertising for, you know, the 3 a. m. shift at that convenience store cooler, that's gonna be pennies. I mean, that one's gonna be really cheap placement to throw an ad up at that time. You want to do it during when everybody's going to grab their coffee and bagel in the morning.

That's going to get out of the real estate. It's going to be a little bit more expensive and that will push to have better quality because why would you invest in something that's low quality? The ability to create the content that changes things. I mean, think about like the Mad Men era of hand painted billboards.

We are far, far, far away from that. Digital billboards, it's somebody creating it or an AI tool, creating the content at that point that changes the copy that changes the content, the quality. I don't know. That's still, I mean, that's a, You're judging off of, it's very contextual because you're judging off of all the other advertisements you've seen recently of how good this one is versus those, you know, and before every ad is great.

I mean, that's going to be a difficult question to answer, but maybe the AI tools will help improve and kind of lift that up. But then again, we go back to the same argument of how do you then cut through once you have that, you know, generic version that everybody's using.

Ruthi Corcoran: Got a couple of thoughts, I think to your point, the stuff's everywhere.

It's like, you see it quickly. It moves on. I just amplifies the amount of stuff that we're seeing. And to that point, I think attention is at an all time high or all time premium. Right? Because you just can't capture attention very quickly. So we're in a time where. Capturing somebody's attention is an all time premium.

Something big like the Red Bull activities, those are okay, but you have to get people there. They have to experience it. Otherwise, it's just one of the many things, and the ROI isn't that great because they just scroll through, they go, oh, that's cool, and then they move on to the next thing. And so the goal is, boy,

I wrote it down really elegantly. And I can't read my handwriting little blip into my world. I write things down.

All right, so I'll backtrack. So in a world where our attention is an all time premium, our goal as, as marketers, as customer engagement folks is to capture people's attention, have them take notice. In the past, I think about like the 90s experience stores where you go to a Nike store and you'd have the different experiences.

You go into an REI and you could take one of their mountain bikes around the track or out of the store. Very cool, right? But you had to go in a store and we live in a world in which you just click the button order online. And so I think the way in which we capture attention and capture notice and get people to go.

Oh, hey, that's kind of cool is going to continue to a change and evolve to meet those. So maybe it's you get a package in the mail and there's a little something extra that goes on. That's a different way of capturing attention in the world. We have that's different than a scroll. So, I think to your question, David is going to be more important for companies to sort of think about those moments, but I don't know if it's going to be sort of the big dramatic events because you might not get the eyeballs to capture to, to make for the ROI.

I think we can start thinking about how do we capture and get provide those experiences throughout people's day in a different life.

Alex Pokorny: Dave, what are your thoughts? That's a great question.

Dave Dougherty: So I want to be, this is my, well, this was my attempt at being, you know, positive.

However, I do think if you look historically, and this is where sort of the digital culture always leaves me wanting more because it's always, what's the new shiny thing. And they completely forget about. What works previously or, you know, we've experienced this in a different way previously, right? So like billboards, for example, you know, Alex, you and I talked about this in a previous conversation either on or off record on, you know, things we did with clients to underline the point of if you are doing a billboard by a highway, right?

Yeah. You know, what'd you see, right? You lift it up, you put it down. That's all the time you get to communicate your message. So don't do a paragraph of text. It has to be a really good visual and maybe five words. That's it. That's all you got. And people still can't do that correctly. And they've been around for like a hundred years.

Alex Pokorny: There's even automated tools that help you determine where eyeballs will be and everything else on those billboards too.

Dave Dougherty: Right. And there's still crap. So it's like, even with the tools that are there, I really think that the AI stuff, as much as everybody thinks it's going to be game changer, it is in certain ways.

Very specific ways, right? Not necessarily um, you know, universe shattering, um, because the way in which people use tools that are already available to them doesn't, you know, there's not a hundred percent adoption rate of your marketing automation suite. Right. And if you can't figure out copywriting for five words.

What things you, what makes you think you're gonna do it with a, you know, automated 500? There has to be a knowledge and a respect there for the medium and, and whatever it is. So, I don't know. I mean, obviously we're still thinking about it. We're still working through. It'll be fun to see how right or how completely wrong we are next year with these, with these predictions, especially with how fast everything's going.

Ruthi Corcoran: I don't have to read email. Sometime in 2024 because AI is doing it for me. I call it a win.

Dave Dougherty: Well, so actually that's, that's an interesting thing. Like, and we'll talk about this on multiple episodes where earlier this year I was reading. weLl, so I wasn't reading, I was listening to the audio book of Satya Nadella's Hit Refresh, which is an old book, but still valid.

Especially with what he's doing. With Microsoft and AI now, but he specifically talks about how artificial intelligence. And Cortana in the Halo games is Microsoft's ideal for how they want um, AI to be. So that to me is a really interesting reference, whether or not we get there anytime soon. But if that's the North Star, even for one of the four, three companies that are, you know, investing a ton of money into this.

That becomes very interesting because then, okay, what is it that Cortana is not good at in those games? And that's anything physical. And it's It's she still needs to be applied to whatever the problem is to find the data, to find the whatever you still have to get there. Right. So I guess that will be our little cliffhanger for future episodes.

Thank you all for hanging out, listening to this, go see the transcript of this on davidartamedia. com, uh, where you can find all the transcripts. Links to stuff that we talk about um, drop your, your comments on YouTube or, you know, rate and review on the podcast players that helps us out, get more people involved, more people asking questions.

So yeah, thanks a bunch. Have a great weekend and we will see you all in the next episode.