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The Age of Average Marketing Podcast and Video Transcript

[This transcript has been lightly edited to ensure readability]

Dave Dougherty: Hello, and welcome to the latest episode of Enterprising Minds, the always cage-free organic podcast. Today we have three topics to discuss and Ruthi's going to go first. So what do you have? What do you have today? 

Are We in an Age of Average for Marketing?

Ruthi Corcoran: All right, so I read an article recently. The Age of Average by Alex Murrell. Murrell? Not sure about pronunciation. Apologies ahead of time. Here's a just brief quote to give you the gist. 

The interiors of our homes, coffee shops, and restaurants, all look the same. The buildings where we live and work all look the same. The cars we drive, the colors, and their logos all look the same. The way we look and the way we dress all look the same. Our movies, books, and video games all look the same. And the brands we buy, their adverts, identities, and taglines all look the same. 

What's fantastic about this article, which of course we will toss in the show notes, is it's filled with different examples of how you'd look at 10 different toothbrush ads and you can't tell them apart. Or there was a shot of all these different white SUVs and at first glance, I honestly thought it was all the same car. Then I looked a little closer to went, “Oh no, those are 20, 30 different cars!” That look somewhat identical at first glance. So my question is, does this apply to marketing?

Are we in the “age of average” for marketing? Do we see growth? A variety in advertising, or are we seeing more of everybody doing the same and getting the same visuals, the same imagery, and they're doing the same tactics? 

Let's open it up. 

Dave Dougherty: So, yes. I have some immediate thoughts and it actually relates to an episode of one of my favorite podcasts that came out yesterday, with Brian Clark. They talk about differentiation. That is something that companies have always struggled with. If you go way back…the example he [Brian Clarke] brings up is, you know, Schlitz beer. Everybody at the time was talking about the purity of the water. This is “pure” beer and you know, whatever else.

But it took a copywriter. To go look at the process and how Schlitz was actually creating the beer and then creating a narrative around it. And that was the thing that took them from the number five beer in the US at the time to being tied to the first. Because people latch onto the story. That's just human nature. 

Personally, I do feel that when we are always tracking everything, you are naturally going to play to the mean. And we see this with a lot of "good enough" content. I've been feeling this a lot with playing around the a with the AI stuff. Where I know there's a percentage of people, more than I probably want to admit, that are just taking the GPT stuff, publishing it, and not really doing copy editing because they don't care about narrative as much as I do.

I think there are a lot of pressures that go into playing to the mean and we can get into that, but Alex, you have your inquisitive face. 

Alex Pokorny: Yeah, my gears are turning, man. I'm kind of all over the board with this one. So, a couple of different points.

So one is that article, I read that article as well, Ruthi. I appreciate you sharing that one. Near the top, there was a story about these two Russian painters and they had this goal of basically showing off the art styles of the world. So they had all these surveys done in particular countries. I think there were like six or seven maybe before that. Kenya was involved, the US was involved, Canada, China, and a number of others.

The surveys basically came out and then they would paint what people responded to in the surveys. And the surveys were all about:

• What do you want? 

• What do you like in your paintings? 

• Do you like abstracts? 

• Do you like curves? Lines? 

• Do you like straight lines? 

• Do you like this or that? 

And it all basically ended up being the exact same painting. There was one that was a little bit different, but there was basically a landscape with a tree and some blue sky and that's it. Everybody basically picked the same thing. So at first glance, everyone has seemingly come to the mean and the average in this case. 

I'm a big fan of the Minneapolis Institute of Art and inside of that, they have an amazing early Japanese art exhibit. It's one of the standard ones that they have that doesn't rotate. And there are some amazing, beautiful landscapes that pretty much hit that same kind of criteria.

If you go to different areas and different cultures, pretty much the same thing. People like blue skies and nice trees and that sort of landscape. There's a very human element to that. So are you revealing what is truly human? Or are you showing the current interests of the time? 

That one to me says this is just a little bit more humanity than anything else. That this is something that we seem to find peaceful. Or those who do a lot of art and share it and seem to be popular. That's the thing that they do, and that's what's popular by those cultural standards at those many different times, like literally 5,000 to 6,000 years, and it's still been basically the same. 

Dave Dougherty: Well in listening to you describe it that way, I just, I can't help but think if that was true, really cheap motel art would be a lot more popular than it is. Right? Because it's always the most inoffensive lighthouse on a coastline. 

Ruthi Corcoran: But that is popular Dave.

Alex Pokorny: Yeah. I mean, look at Etsy, or a couple of the art stores around here. That's what's on the racks. 

Dave Dougherty: You know, it's popular… 

Ruthi Corcoran: I think, I'm going to run with that because it is popular in the mainstream like it's the middle of the curve, but the extremes are, are so diverse from that lighthouse. 

Dave Dougherty: But that's where the interesting stuff happens, right? Is on extremes. Like Monet is great, I appreciate his technique. Klimt is great. Awful at hands. If you ever look at his work he could not figure out how to do hands, but that's fine. For me, I think the Dada movement becomes really, really interesting because of what was happening at that time. What was it a reaction to? Right? I guess this is my bias toward what's the context of everything.

Like art is created in the context of something or in response to something. Landscapes are great, but they don't hit me emotionally, right? It would be like listening to Smooth Jazz. It'd be like, yeah, that's fine, but I'm not going to listen to this more than the elevator ride I'm in. 

[Two of Dave’s favorite contemporary artists]

Alex Pokorny: Well, here's kind of the next one. So that's almost like the identification of a mass market. Basically, you don't want to branch too far outside of the mass market. Maybe you want to test an experiment if you have the resources for it, but you don't want to push the envelope too hard. I think about that with the vehicles piece of the high cost to engineer, market, promote, and push a vehicle.

If you look at any main vehicle manufacturer, their lineup is pretty small. 10 cars? Six? It's not really that many. I mean, that's a pretty big bet that they're putting on those. Plus the machinery and everything that's involved from a logistics standpoint. That's a huge bet. So how far beyond what the current surveys and studies show and how far beyond that do you want to really push?

Same thing with the toothpaste ads. I kind of think of it as I would love to take some of that budget and test some new stuff and play around with it. But man, I would probably keep most of it to be just rock solid, pretty bog standard stuff because the market literally is everybody, so it's pretty hard to go abstract.

Will we hit high levels? No, but we won't hit low levels, so it's a safe bet. That's, that's the awkwardness of it. 

Ruthi Corcoran: Got something, Dave? Are you ready? 

Dave Dougherty: This is what bothers me about lazy a$$ marketing. 

Alex Pokorny: Oh, I mean, there's that. I mean that probably, like most of it is like last year's budget plus 10% and keep it rolling 

Dave Dougherty: Because, I mean, here's the thing. The whole point of marketing is to segment your audience into people who may be interested to buy and people who want to buy. Right?

And if you don't stand for something, you stand for nothing. So you can go the safe route. You can do the most beige, boring kind of ad copy and whatever else. And that will play well to plenty of people. But if you want loyalty out of your consumers or you want brand recognition, you have to do something other than beige and white. 

Like nobody feels good getting into a grandma, gold Camry. I mean, you want to think that you're in a Lamborghini or a Ferrari. You know, those are the posters people put on their walls. It's never a, “I have an accountant car.” 

Ruthi Corcoran: I think the two of you have sort of explained in my mind, 80 to 90% of this averageness in marketing. Which is, on the one hand, you do have that human effect, which is people tend to like some things. It seems we have to test that. Right? 

And then on the other side, you've got either lazy marketing or just the wrong incentives and environment in most corporations. It's profitable to do the status quo. You can project. This white SUV is going to make this amount and we're going to hit this market and that's easy to project. 

Dave Dougherty: Right. Who is afraid of losing their job in the organization? Is it the CMO? Is it the mid-market managers or is it the tacticians? 

Ruthi Corcoran: And that I think is the other piece, which is you're going to have these bright spots of innovation in marketing, product development, which probably comes about with the right environment in a corporation. Like if you can't stick your neck out, or it's not easy to, or you don't have the right team to be able to do it. It's really hard.

I've been reading Emotion By Design, which is by the former CEO, now retired, of Nike. And he gets at a lot of this, which is sort of now coming together for me. Which is you have to inspire and create those sorts of environments for teams to do that, which is why Nike is so amazing. 

And tying back to your, what is the Schlitz beer? They take a look at the root of it. What's the narrative? What's the story? And they build on that. Well, then Nike does something amazing. They put it out there. Then the rest of the [market] follows and goes, “Oh, okay. Yeah, that worked. Let's just do what Nike did. That's easier because we don't have the internal engine to be able to make that happen.” 

Or I think about the iPhone, right? Like they came out and they put something in the market, it's stuck. And now all of a sudden we have an entire industry that kind of looks like the iPhone. I mean, we haven't evolved that much. 

And so maybe it's marketing innovation follows the same as product innovation where you have some leader in the market doing something new and then it sort of works and then everybody follows. That's my theory of average marketing. 

Dave Dougherty: With the iPhone as well...it was so dominant when it came out, which remember it was the second smartphone on the market. It wasn't number one. But then after it became so dominant a lot of the ads that were coming around were, "Well, we're not Apple!" And they targeted the people who just don't want Apple products.

And I remember talking to some of my friends when it first came out and they were like, “I will never buy an Apple product. I will never have an iPhone.” And what do they have now? iPhones.

Alex Pokorny: What half of the US now? It's about 50/50 now. Androids is not really a third either. 

You know, one other interesting one, a really fun Ted talk to watch is Malcolm Gladwell's Pepsi one. And he has a number of stories. One of them is like, man, you go to the aisle of spaghetti sauce in the grocery store and why on earth does Prego have 30 different types? Now that was kind of an interesting question. And there are surveys behind that and he starts to explain what people don't like and where it kind of clusters. And that's kind of his whole point is that humanity seems to find these different clusters.

So, his main story that he has is basically talking about, at that time, and if I'm remembering this correctly, the largest in-person survey ever done was Pepsi. They went around in this, basically a semi-truck around the entire United States, and they had people come into it and say, here's a couple of different cups. Tell me which one you like. 

What they were doing is that they were trying to figure out basically how much aspartame to put into Diet Pepsi. So 0.1, 0.2, 0.3. Basically, what do you guys prefer? And so this massive study goes on for months, and as he says, there is no perfect Pepsi. There are Pepsis because the data clustered and it clustered pretty hard around a couple of different points. So do you make five of them? Or do you make one? 

And it becomes this giant decision of like, well, do you go for the average that 10% probably will find disgusting, 10% will probably love it, and a whole bunch of people in the middle will maybe buy it? I mean, depending on how hard those clusters are it's pretty hard to pick an average then.

So that becomes this interesting question of humanity and all the many different art styles. I think there's a point to why we have so many different art styles. Because humanity does have these clusters, and you do have, like Dave was saying, reactions to the average of, “Man, this was the trend forever. And my gosh, I need to react against it.”

And I say that fully knowledgeable, that the wall color behind me is gray. Ruthi, what's yours? 

Ruthi Corcoran: Oh, white. White. 

Alex Pokorny: Okay. Dave? 

Dave Dougherty: Um, it's a very, very, very light gray. Or a very dark white. 

Alex Pokorny: So we really haven't pushed the topic too far here. 

Ruthi Corcoran: You'll not find a gray wall in my house. I am pushing back against that trend. I cannot stand it. Done. I realize white is a trend too. Fully recognize. 

Dave Dougherty: Yeah, we're building our own institutions for ourselves. That's what it is. 

Alex Pokorny: I just really want the next episode to have an orange wall behind Dave or something like that. That's right. That's it. For reacting against this. 

Dave Dougherty: Yeah. Well, Ruthi has some options. She could go get one of those LED, flashy color change lights and then each week have a different wall color. 

Alex Pokorny: Or just go straight green and just green screen it every single time. That would be fun. 

Environments and Safety for Being Creative and Different

Dave Dougherty: Although, you know, it is interesting, this may be the same thing…It occurs to me as we talk about it, that filters on Instagram and on TikTok are like this too, where if it's just people don't…Hmm, do I say this? 

Alex Pokorny: Are they trying to fit in? 

Dave Dougherty: Well fitting in, but then also just so insecure about how they look that they feel the need to always do that. Right? Because personally, I get really annoyed by those filters. 

Ruthi Corcoran: I think that that links back to this. It's not so much lazy marketing. It's you have to have an environment of creativity and an environment that allows you to do something different and feel good about it. TikTok and Instagram are not environments where it necessarily pays to be different than what people expect. I mean, in some right, there are niches and I think your point of clustering, Alex, is key, which is there are clusters. But if you do not feel like you're part of one of those environments, put on the filter.

It got sad. 

Dave Dougherty: We need a new punk rock movement. You know, I want to see Mohawks and nose chains, and... 

Alex Pokorny: The moment it happens, people will say, “Oh, that's just retro.” 

Dave Dougherty: That, yeah. 

Alex Pokorny: And that just like knocks it down, you know? It's like, yeah. You're not original. 

Ruthi Corcoran: Who's up? Who's up next? 

Dave Dougherty: I'm in a, I'm in a dark spot now, so Alex go.

Alex Pokorny: You know, if you look at subgenres of any music, main kind of music genre on Wikipedia, it is very fulfilling why of trying to find new music styles, but also just the creative stories behind all of them. And also, my gosh, how many there are. I'm a big fan of EDM and it's insane. It's insane how many little subgenres or sub-sub-subgenres there are. So that's kind of a fun way to find some new stuff too. 

Should I Still Learn a Skill AI Can Do?

Alex Pokorny: Okay, so mine I said is a kind of a philosophical question, so it hopefully won't take too much time, but we'll Dave, feel free to cut it off at some point so we can get to yours as well. Um, so the main question is, should I still learn a skill that AI can do?

Dave Dougherty: Yes. 

Alex Pokorny: I got some additional thoughts

Dave Dougherty: to me. Okay. I'm sorry. Before I jump in, were you done? You were. Okay. 

Alex Pokorny: Yep. All set. 

Dave Dougherty: Uh, the audio version of that is going to sound like an a$$hole. But all right. In one of the episodes, we talked about ai, like the steroid scandal of the nineties for baseball. I kind of feel like it is. It will enable you to do more with what you're good at. It's not going to suddenly make you a coder when you don't know to code. Because you won't be able to QA it. You're going to break something. 

Will you be able to write a bunch of bad emails? Yeah, absolutely. But we're at a point too where you need to be able to understand how these things work and truly understand how they work in order to take advantage of them to the fullest.

Because otherwise, if the AI companies roll out some sort of digital watermark there are enough people searching the same topic over and over again, you're going to start getting duplicate content because there are not really that many combinations for niche topics.

That's where my head is, at least at this point. You need to understand how things go and everybody does have their lane. To our point of the three different perspectives on art and the mean and whatever else, it's going to fast track you towards what you're good at but you're still going to need to supplement yourself with a team of people that cover your blind spots. Just like any good manager, any good team would do.

Ruthi Corcoran: Counterpoint. No. Although I am somewhat convinced by “enabling you to do more with what you're good at.” I think that's a very good point, Dave. And on the counterpoint.

Using AI, let's take coding, for example, right? And coding to do custom functionality on your website. I don't need to learn that. I can do it by myself with my own website. All kinds of new things that the amount of time and effort it would've taken me before AI would've made it insurmountable.

So do I need to go and learn how to do that custom coding in order to make this functionality happen? Well, no. I just use AI and it doesn't seem worth the cost. Which, that brings me to the idea that there are different types of activities you're using with AI and there are going to be some things for which it does not benefit you to learn the skill in order to use AI.

If that's not an area of interest already, perhaps is the piece. Whereas if there is an area of interest already, yeah, go for it. Because learning plus being able to use AI is going to enable you to do a lot more than you otherwise would. But if there's just sort of tactical admin type things that, you know, you're not super excited, but they're allowing you to do what you really want to do, then yeah, don't bother, outsource that. AI can handle it. 

Dave Dougherty: This is one of the things for me when I first started playing around with it [AI]. My aunt for years and years and years had her own graphic design business. So when Dall-E first showed up, I was playing around with it and I sent it to her and just went, “Hey, check this out. What do you think?”

And you know, she had that visceral reaction, like I think a lot of graphic designers and visual artists had. Where I was like, “Oh my God. What?” For me though, most of what I use stock images, or like the AI art for would be a header image on the blog or a social post. Something to draw the continuity between you seeing the promotion on Facebook or Instagram or something else, and then that same photo as the header of the blog and we're good.

Because finding those photos has always been a long, arduous thing, but now if you have something that can easily summarize the text. Boom. You're done. Great. 

I have no expectation to copyright on those things, so I don't mind if somebody else has some other image like that. Right? You know, I found out that T-Mobile and I are using the same stock photo and that's fine.

But when GPT came out and all of a sudden it was the writing, then I had that visceral reaction because I didn't really care about the visual piece. Because my ends are different with that. I am happy to find out in my months of playing with it [AI] that I'm actually not that worried about writing right now. The limitations are pretty bad. 

I do fear though that the amount of bad content and misinformation and hallucination that people are experiencing, is going to make people so cynical about what written text online is actually correct versus what's AI and where do I place my trust.

That's kind of a red herring though, but we will…Alex, you've been kind of quiet. What is your question? What's your thought? 

Alex Pokorny: Got a couple. So in preparation for this, I also looked on Quora just because I thought this would be kind of fun to see what math teachers think about calculators. It's a little, somewhat of a parallel here, and it was pretty fascinating.

I mean, there are a lot of replies from like five-plus years ago on it, and they, to reuse the word cluster, but they kind of clustered around a couple of different ideas. 

The main one was, no students shouldn't have [calculators] because they don't then understand the underlying aspects of it. And when they try to get into later forms of math beyond basic algebra, they're at a loss. That was one. 

The other one was, no students should have it because it will hurt their mental memorization or ability to mentally compute things themselves, and there's too much use for that in life. Therefore this is just something that becomes a hindrance to them. So you're teaching them to always have a crutch.

And then there's another one that basically said, if you're really just going to do this one time and you're not really going to be continuing with your random calculus problem, a random geometric problem that you ran into this one time, here's a calculator. And I kind of sit between those because this came up as a real-life example.

Yesterday I was working on a giant keyword universe project. So literally over 12,000 keywords were in a giant Excel sheet, and a whole bunch of them had state names in them or state abbreviations in them. So I wanted to know, okay, how many of these are geo-tagged? And that turns out the keywords were so similar to each other that any cluster thing, software, I tried, couldn't figure it out.

I was like, “Okay, I need an Excel equation that lists every single US state, every single US abbreviation and says yes or no of does it exist inside this cell or not,” and do it all the way down for 12,000 times. 

Now let's break this down a little bit. If this was handwritten, the entire thing, could I do this? Yes. Why am I using Excel? Because there are 12,000 of them. And I can copy-paste, and I don't have to write 12,000 things from the other piece of software that I grabbed the data. And then ChatGPT gave me a really nice equation that included everything and I threw it into Excel. And Excel came over an error and said it didn't work. And I was stuck. 

So there's the next problem. I didn't really understand it well enough to be able to debug the problem, and honestly, I thought my Excel formula skills were pretty good and I, I couldn't figure it out. Even though I do have a lot of experience in that particular area and Excel. Yes, their help messages are better, but my gosh, they're still awful. They really are not helpful. 

So, I kept trying different things and I basically just kept asking ChatGPT to write it. Like, try this a different way. Try this a different way. Try this a different way, and basically copy-paste it until it worked and then I moved on with my day.

Did I understand it still? No. Can I replicate that ever by myself? No. Will I ever be in a situation where I need to? Probably, no. 

So then that one passes the bar for me that one's fine. The same thing with using WordPress instead of hand coding a website. I'm not going to hand-code a website. I'm going to use WordPress or Squarespace or [your sponsor here]. Please contact us. 

Ruthi Corcoran: Alex, I've run into that same situation with Excel and I and ChatGPT and using it in that way. I think that's a really good example and it showcases that the premium is on the abstract, high-level thinking of I need to accomplish this, and how we get there. The means we use to get there may be secondary. Sometimes they're really important. You have to consider the means by which you get there, depending on what you're trying to accomplish. 

But it's the higher level understanding of here's what it is we need to do that I think is more important than understanding how to write the Excel function to be able to do this one particular thing. Which, to your point, we might not do it again and even if you did, you now have the Excel function. 

Alex Pokorny: Right. And if I needed to do it again, I'd be on a computer using Excel. Therefore I'd probably have internet access. Therefore, I'd probably have ChatGPT access. Still want to write it. That one, that one's done. 

It's interesting. Do a little comparison of this. If you had asked me a year ago how to do this, there's a site that comes up more frequently than not called Excel Jet and they have little tutorials. Same as any other Excel helper website that says, you know, Bob, Larry, Greg, and Apple, banana, orange. And if you do this formula, you know this will work out. And okay, now try to do that for whatever you're trying.

I don't need to do that with ChatGPT when ChatGPT can say, list out all the state abbreviations. I don't need to go find a list of that or try to remember all of those. Nope. That's already done for me. Find a list of all the states, of course that's done for me, and then now properly put the semicolons and all the rest between all of that.

Just transposing that data and grabbing it from Wikipedia, whatever source I grabbed it from, that alone would take me 10-15 minutes maybe. And a lot faster to write a prompt for ChatGPT. So I didn't learn it in Excel jet a year ago. I would've learned it this time. I didn't learn it. 

Ruthi Corcoran: And that's okay.

Alex Pokorny: Yeah. That's the question. Is that a loss or is that not a loss? I mean, 

Dave Dougherty: I think underneath all of it though, not everything has to scale. And I think that's one of the things that we're constantly focused on. I know it, there are going to be people who dislike this, but the most creative solutions like the artists we discussed, the things that you can really get behind and will have an emotional impact probably don't scale very well.

This is why they stand out and why it takes such an investment for companies to do that. It has to be made a priority because if you are optimizing for efficiency or return on investment in the short term, you will not fundamentally get the most creative answer. ChatGPT for the analysis [of data] will allow you to get the answer or an answer. So what though? 

Because now it's, it's the tactical piece. It isn't that high-level understanding we talk about with marketing. You want to reach your audience and you want to develop the relationship so that they continue to come back to [our company] and buy from us and do that. 

How many Amazon stores are there that really just import stuff from Alibaba, put it onto the Amazon dropship, and just AdWord the hell outta ya? Right? Is that equivalent to the GPT Excel formula? Maybe. Maybe.

Ruthi Corcoran: I like that bridge, Dave. It took me a second to get where you were going. I like it. 

Dave Dougherty: This is the problem of thinking out loud. Yeah. I don't know. I think I'm firmly planted in my sandbox, which is why I have to toy around with these ideas and I'm glad we have these discussions. Because it does make me think and it does showcase where I may be stuck or where I may be proven correct. 

I do feel like more people should understand the history of anything before they jump in and say technology is going to save us or make this utopia or whatever.

I think there, it would be interesting to look at productivity gains for all of these software tools and whether or not we've actually had productivity gains with all of the tools or not. And will another one actually make a difference? Probably not because you're dealing with human nature. Don't know. 

If anybody knows of a study like that, please let us know so that we can talk about it. 

Ruthi Corcoran: Well we gotta table that one. That's a good conversation, but we don't have time for that today. The impact of technology gains on human productivity. Alex and I studied econ, we're ready to go. 

Dave Dougherty: I have a semester of it.

Ruthi Corcoran: You got a question for us, Dave?

Dave Dougherty: I did. Now I just, I don't know.

Ruthi Corcoran: Alex has you questioning everything. 

Dave Dougherty: No, I'm kind of fixated on this punk rock thing. I think we need more rebellious outlets in our society. Healthy rebellious outlets, I should say. Not, not what we have currently. 

Is Duplicate Content More of a Concern with ChatGPT?

Dave Dougherty: One thing I guess, one sort of open question I was seeing on LinkedIn from a person in the SEO realm that were making an argument around the duplicate content piece. Where if you're using it for title tags if you're using it for body copy and everything else that is a lot of the same you can start seeing people just copy-pasting and then it'll show up in the search if you search for that particular phrase.

I'm wondering if either of you have tried this, thoughts on the duplicate content argument or concern? Does Google not care anymore because it's just going to be flooded with bad copy like it was previously? What are your thoughts on that? 

Alex Pokorny: I have seen that and I played around with it.

There were some old examples, I think a month or two ago, and that's what I mean by old these days. But it was basically this one particular phrase around some recipes or something like that, and this site that suddenly had popped up suddenly had the same weird phrase over and over and over again.

There was one that was just done,a pretty major site, and it was like travel guides and there was this weird phrase. It was in every single random small-town city travel guide. And not surprisingly, it was AI created. And the same thing with the recipes. They were AI created as well.

So can you get around that? Yes. There are particular limits even. Sure, GPT has some default settings basically that you can change to say, do you want a more kind of out-of-the-box response or do you want a more standardized response? So there are ways from the kind of new phrase of prompt engineering, you can get around that and play around with that stuff. Including word choice, including how frequently it repeats itself. I mean, a lot of things are different. 

Am I concerned about it from an SEO standpoint? I don't know. Going back to Ruth's thing, maybe this is the new mean. I mean, this is just the new average. The new average piece of copy is a ChatGPT piece of copy, and that's the new floor that basically you need to rise above. And it's smart to create it and start with it so that you have something, but then upgrade it and do better.

The other thing is, as AI tools keep rapidly progressing, I would imagine that GPT 5/6/7/8 will be considerably better with their word choice. And then this is a current moment issue.

Ruthi Corcoran: I think at this point it might be a red herring for a couple of reasons. One of the points, Alex just brought up could be. We just have a new standard. Two, there's a lot of time and energy spent talking about duplicate content. A lot of time and energy and time and energy that you could just be spending. Creating good, better content.

Like to me it comes back to what's the user experience. And if you have several pages that have the same content or the same headers, that's confusing for a user. It's not helpful. Right? They just read that on the previous page perhaps, and now they're seeing it again. That's just not particularly helpful.

So ultimately I think the discussions were perhaps a bit of a waste of time. If instead, you can focus on creating good-quality content and experiences.

Alex Pokorny: Then from the, one of the points you made, or part of your question too, was about Google.If you see how many AI co-written books are on Amazon, they're all e-books because they haven't even printed fast enough to become books. Are we seeing e-book spam? I would say yes, and we're going to see more of it.

It'll be, any random topic you can think of will be an ebook and it'll probably be available for a good old 99 cents because that's what they all seem to sell for. 

Ruthi Corcoran: Oh. Quick prediction based on that. We're going to see the importance of publishers and content curators go up with this crazy influx of new AI, human-created content. 

Alex Pokorny: I still think we're going to get an organic tag. Things will be tagged organic or  AI-supported or assisted or something like that. 

Ruthi Corcoran: Cyborg.

Alex Pokorny: That's next. 

Dave Dougherty: How well do you think AI is with romance novels? 

Ruthi Corcoran: No idea. I don't... 

Alex Pokorny: Probably amazing. Because there's a million of them and they're pretty formulated. 

Ruthi Corcoran: Lots of sourced content. 

Alex Pokorny: I know. Like the corpus. I mean, just look at Danielle Steele. I mean, I know the name. Not that I've ever read one of the books, just because you go to a library, you can see shelves of that. 

Dave Dougherty: I mean, who doesn't love Fabio? Come on.

Alex Pokorny: Whoever does the cover art on those, that's a Dall-E gold mine. Because I imagine the cover art is just either there's a giant stack corpus out there that you could create a whole Dall-E of just pure romance trash book novels. I'm sure. 

Ruthi Corcoran: Silhouettes of the couple. 

Alex Pokorny: Right, exactly. Yeah. And some... 

Dave Dougherty: There's always a strong wind coming from some direction. 

Alex Pokorny: Exactly. Oh my gosh, it's windy. It's windy. And man, no guy can ever find a clothing store with shirts. Pants, yes. No shirts. They just aren't available. 

Dave Dougherty: They rip in that strong of a wind. 

Ruthi Corcoran: That's right. That's right. 

Dave Dougherty: So speaking of Fabio, as you know, two guys that are follicly challenged, I think that's a perfect place to end. Thank you for listening.

If you have any articles or any supporting evidence for any one of our arguments, please let us know. Like, comment, subscribe, share, and we will see you in two weeks with the next episode. 

Ruthi Corcoran: See you.