Datasets:

nrbhole

/

llm-dataset

like 0

Transcript of 'Brush Strokes Episode 88':

Hey everybody, this is Mark Potter, welcome to another episode of Brushstrokes, a podcast powered by Canvas Magazine. Guys, today's episode is brought to you by my friends at America's Prince Show. America's Prince Show, or APS, will once again partner with industry manufacturers, associations, industry influencers, educators, and printers to expand on the great success of the inaugural three-day event that was held in August 2022. America's Prince Show 2024 will once again be a partnership of industry segments. The show is positioned to be a collaboration of visioning and thought leadership intimacy.

It's going to have nationally renowned speakers, experts. They've got some really, really great stuff going. And as I said before, these guys are focused on bringing back some humaneness to a print trade show. Certainly they want to show you the great exhibits and all the suppliers of our great industry, but they also want to make sure that there is some stimulating conversation, presentations, and some great engagement. So put it on your calendars because it's for May 8th and May 9th of 2024, and it's being held at the Huntington Convention Center in Cleveland, Ohio.

Again, that is Wednesday May 8th and Thursday May 9th, 2024. Huntington Convention Center in Cleveland, Ohio, that's America's Prince Show. You can find out more at America's Prince Show dot com. Guys, I am super, super excited to bring you a conversation I had with a gentleman by the name of Derek Chiu. And Derek Chiu is a guy who much like we have here at Conduit built his business and had some challenges along the way and was better for it.

He is the founder of Full Moon Digital and is a former early Yahoo employee. Full Moon Digital is one of the few 100% independent digital marketing agencies in the United States. The firm is cross functional with deep experience and media planning and buying digital consultancy, SEO, digital strategy, programmatic, analytics, performance marketing, paid media, you name it, they do it. They simply push the envelope of what is possible in terms of marketing and technology all while providing best-in-class digital marketing services to their pack of clients. It's funny I came across Derek because I'm so interested in understanding this whole concept of artificial intelligence and how it's going to impact our industry and quite honestly our world in general.

Derek has been talking a lot about humanizing AI, essentially making marketing more relatable with AI. I think that bottom line is all of us have some fears about AI and what it could do to not only our job security, but possibly making things seem a little bit too robotic and eliminating what makes our industry so great. And that is the human fact and effect. And so certainly a lot of us have heard about chat GPT and it's been increasingly adopted for marketing tasks, but as Derek will share with you 66% of consumers want more human involvement in the design and delivery of their experiences. And in fact, 59% of business support that they see a reduction in revenue by using AI.

So while AI is all the rage, here's a guy who's intimately involved in digital marketing and will tell you that it's all about his relationships with the marketplace. He's sitting here to say, hold the phone. Yes, it might be an interesting tool, but we need to humanize it. And I think we as an industry need to get our heads around this and start talking a little bit more about this. In fact, our sponsors America print show, America's print show will in fact have some part of their conference dedicated to AI.

So you've got some people who are going to get our arms around this and see how it is not just going to elevate us, but take us to a new path of revenue for all of us. So I think it's pretty exciting stuff and maybe not something that we should fear so much. Anyways, without further ado, why don't you give my conversation with Derek to a listen and enjoy it. It's just so interesting for me to have an opportunity to talk to somebody who is, I mean, I assume you're kind of immersing yourself in this whole thing, right? Rather than go, only smokes AI is, is because let's face it.

I mean, it's a scary gig for a lot of people right now. And so I get the sense that you're probably more like, well, no, no, we got to kind of get our arms around this and embrace this and understand it. But I liked kind of your message in general, or a sense that your message is this whole idea about each humanizing it. So what first, so when this AI thing has started to crop up and it's obviously reaching a kind of a bit of a crescendo here or a peak, what was your mindset in terms of your business and in your agency and and you know, why did you think I got to get my arms around this little thing? Yeah, well, it's interesting, right?

So when it comes to marketing itself in the digital space, there's been a lot of tools and a lot of software over the years that tend to replace or displace marketers, right? So if I go back, you know, just a few short years ago, you had a lot of, you know, paper, click, automated software coming to market. So the big, big names like, you know, Ken Shue and Merrin were just, I'm anxious now, Sky, and at espresso and a lot of these automated tools that claim to do your job for you, get you better results, right? Get you supposedly real-time optimization. When those came into market, you have no idea how many PPC marketers that I spoke to were freaked out because, you know, they're saying, hey, look, the company just has to install this and everything will be automated and you'll get better results.

Well, five years have passed, right? There's still hundreds of applicants for PPC jobs out there, thousands. So, you know, just putting things in context and especially for, you know, someone like myself who have been through so many years of evolution, of platforms and digital tools, the fear is a little probably less, it's more cushioned for me, than someone who, let's say, just started doing marketing six months or a year ago. Right. Right.

So I've seen that evolution, there's not as much to fear as people make it out to be, because the way AI works is binary, right? If something is good, keep on doing good, keep on tweaking and learning the right path. If something is bad, stop it. Right. So it's very binary.

So when we talk about humanizing AI, we're talking about, well, the AI knows if someone's going to buy something or not, right? But the AI doesn't know about my personal life. Right. So, you know, and to do that, and I've told this to many, many peers as we talk, like, AI will never interview me like you do. Right.

We will never talk about what we like to do on the weekend, what we like to do with our families. I mean, all those, if you think about it, all those influence your purchase behavior. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

Yeah. And I, you know, I wonder, it's interesting, because, you know, before we started doing this, you and I were talking offline about even the resilience, right, that you have in your business within your agency that came from the time that you started it. Right. So I'm just taking back to just what we were talking about this. In some respects, because changes come so fast in technology, maybe culturally, we're almost a little bit hard into it, right?

I mean, like you said, I mean, when all these do it yourself, technologies, or do it for you technologies were coming on board. At first, it was scary. I wonder if there's a little bit of that. I do, I mean, I do sense some fear, right? Because there's a lot of publicity about AI eliminating all these jobs and having, but I wonder if maybe we're a little bit more resilient.

Obviously, you are, but I wonder in general, if we are, and we can realize what I think your, your message is is that, look, we got to keep this, keep this real. We're this is going to, you keep this humanized, right? Yeah. Yeah. Look, out of, out of 1000 marketers, when AI comes into play, there will be some replacements and displacements that's guaranteed in any kind of technology evolution, right?

But, you know, I probably get crucified for this, but the ones who are displaced were probably the ones that were not keeping up with technology the first place. Right. Right. So it takes, like you said, it takes perseverance. It takes a lot of, you know, the always game on mentality.

No, right. To keep up with trends, to even, even if you're just dabble and know about it. Right. That's, that's probably 80% better than the next person. You know, I give you an example, we had, I was talking to a client a couple of months ago, and we're talking about content, and I was pitching the client and upsell on, on content marketing.

And, and the client hit me with the question, well, there, you know, with this chat GPT stuff, like we could create content ourselves, we just have to know how to use the tool. And we can train our internal, mad at marketing person to use the tool. And, and I thought, okay, well, I see where this is going, right? And, and the client said, well, do you use GPT for your client's content? Right.

So I felt, okay, I felt I could either say, well, we rely on that. I could, you know, I could go so many directions, but all I, but I initially said, I thought a client said, well, the reality is that we use GPT, but as a tool, right? Right. And it's not going to replace any of our team members because the one thing that you do not have is empathy and emotions. Right.

Exactly. And I don't think that goes out of style, right? You'll never, right? Your business, from the day you build it to, to, to now is predicated on relationships. And I, you said earlier, I, it can't tell you about you.

It doesn't know about you, your family, your feelings, all that kind of stuff. And I just don't see that ever going out of style. And, and, and, and, and so, but I don't want, but you don't want that to be defensive either. Like, hey, I'm, I'm shouting at the mountaintops what chat GPT can't do. You know, that's certainly the shortcomings, but, but you, what sounds like you're saying, you know, you want to wrap your arms around it.

There are places, there's, there's got some utility, but it's never going to replace personality. It's never going to replace the depths of our connection. Am I right? Yes. So, so, you know, balance.

It's really, and a, a critical mindset and component to this entire coexistence of AI and humans. Yeah. Right. Yeah. There, there are, there are, you know, advocates of AI to say, no, no, no, no, no, no, AI is going to just take over everything and it's going to do everything for you.

And then you have on the other extreme, where it says, no, humans will never succumb to the, you know, the barrage of this AI, you know, in a war, but there, there's, there's, I, I'm very confident. There's a happy meat, like middle ground, where AI and humans can coexist in terms of augmenting each other's capabilities. Right. Right. I feel like AI is good as a speeding thing.

So, so that the human side can actually make better and better decisions from the human side of things. Right. Yeah. I see that. You know, that's interesting, Derek, because now that you're saying that, I actually can see that in my life, where I've used chatGPT, for example, to do some organizational stuff, right.

It can, it can script and outline some stuff. It's not, it's going to be a little antiseptic, but it's good. All right. So it can, it can get some stuff organized for you and structured for you and, and, and, and it's interesting that you say that because I do think it frees me up to do what, not only I love, but, but, but I think what people crave and that is this, right. Connect.

Because this is where this is where growth comes from. You know, it's where learning comes from. It's, it's when you're talking about this from from a place of experience and then being able to share, you know, to share a story like that of a client, it makes it real. And, and I think we're still kind of craving that. And I, and I just feel like this has got to be a little bit of a crusade.

And that's why I think it was so interesting to hear from you. What, what, so if you said for marketers in general right now, because let's, let's, let's face it, there's a lot of marketers that they, there are some that want to embrace this. And, and, and, but then there's others that are fearful of it. What's your advice to, to, to both groups? Well, the ones that fear it, you know, the, the, the majority of them are afraid of being off losing their jobs.

Right. So, to, to that group, I'd say, you know, we'll buckle up, you know, and really kind of hone your skills and, and evolve with technology, right. So instead of being afraid of chat GPT on board, I mean, I think that right now there's probably already dozens and dozens of generative AI spinups. Right. Right.

And only a few will survive. But instead of fearing it, really, studying and taking the time to understand how it can actually help you become a better marketer. Right. Right. Now, the ones who are wanting wants to go all in on that, I will remind you of Google goggles.

I will remind you of, you know, the first ecompets.com time errors. Yeah, there's a lot of first adopters that go all in. And here's what gets after three months of chat GPT being announced and being available. We are seeing experts everywhere. Right.

Right. I have been doing paid media digital marketing for over two decades. Right. I still am bashful calling myself an expert. Right.

All right. And then still don't consider myself an expert, consume myself a continuous learner of digital marketing. Right. So, for those who go all in and claim that they're experts and they can figure things and automate everything for their clients or for their systems. I'd say, you know, a slice of humble pie is something that we don't mind serving you.

Yeah. I love that. I really love that. And the reason is because it's one is so true, right. People just start to it like it's a race to market themselves as this expert.

And you know, the challenge is something else could follow quickly behind it, right. And things change so quickly. And you're you're defining yourself by this tool. Whereas you are probably more defined by the people that you serve, right. And the understanding of the markets that you serve.

And my guess is that great marketers have that mindset. And yes, the tools may come and go and certainly, but but those who have the better understanding of the client base are the ones who win. Is that fair? Yes. And I'm very biased because I have kind of built full moon as a people agency.

Right. And it's an agency that is agnostic to tools, agnostic to software. It's about, hey, you know, client, Mr. Climes is flying. What is your objective? And how can we use the right tools to help you accomplish what you need?

Regardless of what they are, right. If it's chat GPD, sure. By all means, let's do, right. But if it's if it's Excel, sure, let's use Excel. It's really those to to to to me to my team to everyone that I've spoken to, I'm always going to hold my ground that no matter how awesome a tool like here to be, it is merely a tool.

And if you're putting garbage in garbage, regardless of what you do, right. And at the end of the day, and it's the understanding of the human side that will really help you succeed. Right. I really love that. And and I think that's the place to start with.

Right. That's the place to start from is that the client, the marketplaces is everything. And but let's let's talk tactics. Let's talk. So that's that's where you start strategically.

That's the mindset that's your that's that's how you built your agency. Your your familiarity with this AI and how you're using it today. How does that translate to because you talk a little bit about how you've got it, like you just said garbage in garbage out. All creativity. Can you speak to it tactically or even share some thoughts on or examples about how you've got to in use that human creativity along with it.

Yeah. Yeah. Of course. So then you know, I'll share everything that there's new secrets in digital marketing. Everyone uses Google ads.

Everyone uses Google. Everyone uses same platforms. Right. Right. So so when when when when Chad GPD came out, we're all I said, Hey, T just go play out.

So go learn. Right. And working with me. Surprise. Everyone came back with their own opinions and how Chad GPD should work.

Yeah. So I'm like, okay, well, first of all, we don't know everything. But it's a let's just put that on the table. Right. Yeah.

Let's just pet fun with these marketing tools and really see what we can kind of, you know, create. Right. And as time went by, when you allow here stick, when you allow your team to autonomy to go test, to go play with tools, they come back with really interesting things. Right. When you don't put them in a box.

Right. So over time, over months, ideas started coming from the team and say, Hey, Derek, like we can try using Chad, for a, b, scene, you know, items that want one of the things that really was intriguing to me. And it seems it's so basic. But I feel people jump over that because it's like, yeah, it's too basic, right. Um, is comparing Chad GPD ad copy.

Right. With with the hero in ad copy. No. Right. And see which one resonates better.

And there's no shaming losing to AI. Right. No big blue beat a lot of chess players. Um, so it was, it was, that was the interesting part. Right.

Now with our clients, we can't say that, Oh, it works for client A, therefore, it must work for client B. Right. So we are actually in the process of meticulously testing one planet time campaigns at a time. It's slow. It's very slow.

Now AI cannot speed up. Right. So a client only has X dollars to spend on whether it's $5,000 or $500,000. Right. Right.

AI cannot create more budget for you. But AI can serve as a tool for YouTube test. Right. And we're doing that as a very technical approach. Um, you know, almost, almost at say super boosting A B testing.

Right. Because if, if you have four humans create copy, there's a very high likelihood that they all think the same way with the clients. Right. Yeah. That's actually just a, that's a really good point.

Um, and I, and I think that's, that's what it's supposed to be. I mean, I have, I am a client who literally told me this morning that that hey, they can't, they're banned from using chat GPT. The whole organization. And so, there are some people that are fearful that it does lose a little of that humanness, right? That it's, it's, it's not engaging enough.

And I feel like, um, so that's not necessarily a bad thing. But I also think that if somebody's gonna adopt it, it's gonna get a little bit stale. And, and I'm not, and people can just start to tell like that. It wasn't written by anybody, right? And so, personality sometimes comes with our flaws.

And, and, and, right? And, yeah. So that's why I think it's so important that your, your message is, hey, it's a, it's a tool. You can play with it. You can test with it.

There are some places that it makes sense, but it's, it's never going to, um, it's never going to replace you. You know, well, it is, but, you know, here, as we talked about this, here's a scary thought for, um, and industry that potentially may not have, may not need as much human emotions and writing aspect of things, right? Technical assembly instructions, right? You go to, you know, whether you go to ITL or you order something from Amazon, and you have this manual of step one, to set 60, on, on things together, go, I can see 10GP need 100% right? And that's a lot of people in that, but writing space and do technical spec writing.

That could be in, in general. And in some ways, it forces people to be, in some ways, it actually forces people to be more human if you think about it. Right? I mean, are we really supposed to be pounding out that kind of drivel? I mean, I, you know, that, that's fairly benign.

And, and I think that the creative human spirit is something that we don't want to lose. Um, and maybe with this whole push of AI, there might even be a push back to human. You remember, do you, I don't know if you, you probably, uh, ever watched a sign felled, uh, episode, there was a guy, uh, so like the George Castanza, uh, and if you've ever watched that, there was a, there was an episode where he decides to do the opposite of everything that comes naturally to him. Because I think I remember that. Yeah.

Yeah. I really have this out. Yeah. He basically orders a different sandwich. He goes up to a woman, he talks to her and ends up getting, he tells Steinbrenner everything, he, you know, what's wrong with the team and he ends up getting the job of the Yankees and it was hysterical, right?

And it would, and the, and I thought the moral of the story was in some respects, don't necessarily follow the herd, you know, do, do the opposite and, and, and I feel like in a lot of ways, AI, there's going to be a lot of people go, oh, I guess this is the next thing. I'd better follow it. And yet aren't the most creative ones, the ones that say that's, that's fine. I'm not going to discount it, but I, I'm still about connecting more deeply on a more intimate level. Does that, does that fair?

Yeah. Um, it, it does resonate a lot with what we do here, right? Um, and, and, and especially when we bring on new, new, new people, new team members, new tech members who have been working larger companies, um, there's always say, well, we did this there. Well, great. Keep it there.

Right? Not, um, you know, we, we are here because we are different, intentionally different. Um, and so, uh, you know, one of the things, and so we, I always get into conversation with prospects, you know, who wants to work with us and say, hey, like, what's so different about full moon that we can't find other agencies? So I'm like, well, it's, it's not that difficult, guys. I say, well, we only take on seven new clients a year.

Yeah. All right. So that is a total anti-agency approach because I've been an agency, we're all I've been in the house where you just have to just pow on, that's much as you can to build a top one. Mm-hmm. Right.

Um, but I've also been on that and receiving an overburnt. Mm-hmm. So, you know, it's like, okay, well, everyone's doing that. Great. I have been that I know how to prevent burnout, which is the number one agency, chili, right?

Right. 100%. I, that resonates with me because I think that it goes back to something you said earlier and, and, or certainly the message that you were sending, and that is, you're defined by the people that you serve. And in some respects, right? If you're, if you, if I said to you, all right, Derek, well, who do you guys serve?

And you said, well, anybody who's got dollars to spend, right? Then at some point, you're, you don't really mean anything to anybody. But if you say, listen, and if somebody, it's the old elevator story, right? I get into the elevator and somebody says, it turns to you and says, Derek, what do you do? And it's like, you know, and you go through all the different things that you do from a tactical standpoint.

That's when they go, all right, yeah, somebody else can do that too. But if it's different, if your answer is more about, well, I can't really explain everything I do is per se. I can tell you about the people that we serve and who I stand for. I mean, to me, that's powerful. And that's kind of what I got from you earlier.

And, and I feel like that whole message is when, I don't, it doesn't really matter. AI might be the greatest tool. But if that is, is what matters to you is who you serve. And I define myself with it. That's powerful stuff.

Sounds like you guys share that internally a lot. Yeah, 100% agree with you on that. Look, if AI is the only thing you fear now, let's buckle ourselves. X five years, 10 years, that's going to be something new that's going to come along. Right.

Right. So there's really no time to appear. Everything that comes along that can potentially threaten your job or your existence. I, I rather lie team, like clients and anyone I talk to invest that time. We direct that time into how do we involve ourselves?

Right. One of the philosophies of our team is, you know, so I've been in companies where they do a lot of personality testing, strengths, weakness gaps and all that stuff. Right. So the, the popular test is to find your weaknesses and be like, okay, well, how can we pay it's good and torture? Right.

I poorly did not subscribe to that. I, I am off the line, I'll let's hide people who are any good at what they do. Instead of investing in trying to take someone from not good to good, if we find someone that's good, we can now use their time more effectively, taking that person from good to great. Right. Exactly.

Yeah. I love that. I love that. And, you know, and that's, and you get a kind of dance to the beat of your own drummer in that respect. And again, we hear all those kind of monitors.

That's a, I think that's a, that's a really, really good point in terms of, hey, let's, we're trying to get stuff done first and foremost. Right. So, and, and the leadership, you, is all about the, the, the customer. Let me, let's get this done. And then, when you're, and, and, and if everybody's pulling in that direction, the purpose of the organization will set the culture.

And if they don't want to be part of that, then they, you know, they'll make the choice themselves. I suppose. Right. And, and that's okay. Right.

Not everyone's cut out to being swat. Not everyone's cut out to be a firefighter. Right. You, not everyone's, you know, going to be an astronaut, but a lot aspire to, right. That might, no one, no one's willing to go through the training to get, you know, let me ask you a foil, let me ask you, what do you think, what, let me tactically, what do you think some of the industries or businesses that are really going to be adversely affected by this whole AI thing?

Oh, that's, that's a big question. Yeah. I just wonder what businesses, I mean, you know, you talked, I mean, I mean, customer service. Yeah. Customer service will be affected.

All right. You may not need 50 people in your call center anymore. If you're able to connect up a very good, self-serving system. And then that's where he started, right. If you look at all those web chat boxes that existed many years ago, right.

That already took out a percentage of customer service. Right. And then now you have AI that can actually carry on in conversation. Now, I remember when I was in college at IU, I was actually learning how to program AI interactions on the Sun Microsystem computer. Wow.

All right. The only problem back then was AI doesn't remember what you tell it. Right. So, but now which at GPT, the ability to retain what you told that AI system for the AI to continuously have a meaningful dialogue with you, I don't say conversation because that we have a conversation, right. AI's have dialogue.

That could potentially definitely hurt or I guess, you know, kind of take a chunk out of customer service. Yeah. It kind of industry at the whole. Yeah. That makes sense.

And, and obviously some of that stuff that you were talking about earlier, where you're doing some technology writing, that kind of stuff. But that's interesting. What about about campaigning, if you will, or putting together campaigns, you know, and personalization. One of the things that I saw is like you said earlier, garbage in, garbage out. I can't just say, hey, chat, GPT write me this letter or I can't, you know, or do that.

I mean, it just doesn't do it. I found that if I've ever used it, I've literally gone to painstaking efforts to explain kind of when I'm looking right. I probably get a written it. I could have written it already, right. Yeah.

Yeah. And then it spits it out. And so that's why I can't ask it to write. But I ask it to organize. And so, but that does, that is interesting, isn't it?

Yeah. You are giving it a very specific set of guidelines and rules, right. Now, all right. So in the, in the assembly line for auto companies, manufacturers, right. All those robotic arms, they're AI.

Yeah. They know when to stop, where to stop, precisely micro measurements. You don't just plug in that robotic arm as they go build a car. Right. You still get, you still spend thousands of hours building instructions into programming it into, you know, finetuning it and making it, you know, giving it the right instructions to do the job.

So in your example, you kind of got a very good point there where, you know, AI exists in the formal chat GVTS we're talking about now, but you may be spending 30, 40 minutes, telling it what you need done, right. And during that time, you probably realized I had just came out with my own idea. Chat GPT just packaged it to look really nice. I think that's a really interesting point, right. Because you might actually be using it almost as, you know, you're bouncing it off chat GPT.

It's like a sounding word in some respects, right. Yes. It can help you clarify some thoughts and, but it's funny because I've used it in kind of in that way. And I usually, you know, there's times when I've, you know, I might do a client update note and I'll say, hey, here's what I want everybody to know. Here, you know, their files are going to be due here, or we're blah, blah, blah, blah, right.

And it'll spit this thing out. I'm okay, but I'll go back and I edit it. So it's almost, it is kind of almost like just a sounding born assistant. I mean, you can use it in that respect, right. Yeah.

For sure. You're right. And I think different industries have the version of the sounding board with chat GPT. Yeah. Of course, if you're an architect, you might want to steer away from that.

Yeah. But if you are in writing, you know, writers may actually, I'm going to say write a hardcore, like, you know, scholar level writers may shy away from chat GPT all together, right. But if you are just writing content or a blog or if you are writing a, you know, short articles somewhere, you might, you might kind of work with chat GPT for maybe syntax grammar and structure, right. And kind of as a subfeme bag, you know, if you have, it's like, nobody wants to talk to me, fine, chat GPT, you know, kind of, review my work. Right.

Right. No, I think that's good. I mean, that's, that's exactly right. There's a lot of people, you know, my team, they sometimes they don't want to, they don't want to hear from me. So maybe chat GP chat GPT might be the only one that listens.

I don't know. We'll see. But listen, I, this has been really, really cool. And I, I, I, um, where can, let's do a shameless plug here. Okay.

Where can they find you and tell me, tell them a little bit about your organization. So terrible plug. And just the worst. Yeah. So, our website is fullmoondigital.com.

That's got to work and learn more about what we do, who we serve. Kind of a little bit of story in my background, how full moon started about six years ago. And, you know, if anyone wants to reach out and have a conversation about anything digital, it'll bring to your email media. Derek D.E. R.E.K.

at fullmoondigital.com. That's awesome. Why I can't thank you enough for doing this. I think it's super cool. And, and, um, we're gonna be, uh, we're gonna be talking again.

I look forward to it. There's a lot to talk about. Yeah, absolutely. Hey guys, I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Derek Chu. I think you'll find that it was pretty refreshing to hear a guy who is certainly very knowledgeable about digital marketing and marketing in general.