AI & Marketing: Marketer’s FAQs answered!

Introduction and Context

• Timestamp: 00:00:00 – 00:00:29
  • Ross emphasizes the importance of AI in marketing and sets the stage for the discussion by highlighting the value of AI tools in enhancing marketing strategies and efficiency.

AI’s Role in Content Creation

• Timestamp: 00:05:30 – 00:10:45
  • Detailed Content:
    • Ross outlines the process of using AI tools for content creation. He suggests starting with a detailed brief and utilizing AI to draft initial versions of the content. For example, he mentions using tools like Jasper and Copy.ai to generate content ideas.
    • He advises against publishing AI-generated content as is. Instead, marketers should edit and personalize the content to add their own experiences and insights, elevating the content quality from an 8.5 to a 10.
    • Ross’s approach emphasizes creating high-quality content that can be repurposed and distributed multiple times, aligning with his methodology of “create once, distribute forever.”

Improving Personalisation with AI

• Timestamp: 00:12:15 – 00:20:00
  • Detailed Content:
    • Ross discusses the use of AI in enhancing personalisation efforts. He highlights how tools like HubSpot and Marketo can segment audiences and personalise email campaigns effectively.
    • AI can analyze customer data to create tailored marketing messages, improving engagement and conversion rates.
    • He also touches on the importance of using AI for memory storage and brand guidelines, ensuring consistency in marketing efforts.

AI in Social Media Management

• Timestamp: 00:22:30 – 00:30:45
  • Detailed Content:
    • Ross explains how AI can optimize social media management by analyzing engagement metrics and adjusting strategies accordingly. Tools like Hootsuite and Buffer are mentioned for their AI integration in scheduling posts and analyzing performance.
    • He provides examples of AI-generated video content and ads, predicting that AI-created ads could soon dominate high-profile events like the Super Bowl.
    • Ross also talks about the use of AI for creating and managing social media content, ensuring that posts are tailored to audience preferences and trends.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) with AI

• Timestamp: 00:33:00 – 00:40:20
  • Detailed Content:
    • AI-powered SEO tools like Clearscope and MarketMuse are recommended for keyword research, competitive analysis, and content optimization.
    • Ross emphasizes the importance of using AI to identify key topics and optimize content to improve search engine rankings.
    • He suggests continuous monitoring and updating of SEO strategies based on AI insights to stay ahead in search rankings.

Challenges and Ethical Considerations

• Timestamp: 00:45:10 – 00:50:00
  • Detailed Content:
    • Ross highlights the potential biases in AI algorithms and the need for transparency in AI applications.
    • He stresses the importance of continuously monitoring and evaluating AI tools to ensure they align with ethical standards and marketing goals.
    • Discussions also include legal considerations, such as the need for regulations to protect intellectual property and personal likeness, and how these regulations can impact innovation.

Transcript (AI generated – May contain some errors)

Speaker 1: Hello, lovely humans. I hope you’re doing great. It’s so lovely to see you here today. Thank you so much for taking the time. I think we’re going to have a lot of fun today. We should get going quite quickly because there is so much to get through. First things first, if you are a regular marketing meetup attendee, you will well know the screen by now. The first thing I’ll ask you to do, because I can see there’s folks in the chat feature right now who have been so wonderful and popped where you’re watching from, like Joe Royce in Amersham right now and Laura in Kent. Some of these messages are presently going to hosts and panelists only. Chantelle, I’m calling you out. Your message went to hosts and panelists only. If you’re in the chat feature right now and you’ve got a toggle which presently says to hosts and panelists, switch that to everyone so everyone can see your messages. Then once you have popped where you’re watching from, just like Abby, Helen, Zoe, Emma, Alex, Paul, James and way more of you have done. It’s so lovely and thank you for taking the time today. Today we have a returning legend coming to speak at the marketing meetup. This is Ross’s third time, I think. Actually, I think Ross is the first person or the quickest person between one webinar and the next to return to speak to the marketing meetup. The context for today is we had Ross speak quite recently during our AI season. The number one comment that was left in that chat feature, that amazing chat feature, which Rachel, Sharon, Dina, Alice, Arifa and Kim have all contributed to in the last couple of seconds was that Ross needs to come back and do a part two. That’s exactly what we’re doing today. What we’re doing is we’re taking your questions from all of those four sessions from the previous AI season and we’re going to rattle through as many as that we can in a high pace, hopefully practical, hopefully a lot of fun session that you are very important to be part of. Before we get going, I want to say a big thank you to our featured sponsor this week who are Frontify. Frontify enable you to keep your brand consistent. What they do is they take all of your database, all of your assets, and they put them into one place so your team can keep them in one space and keep that consistency, which as you all know, because you are smart marketers is really important when you turn up as your brand in a consistent fashion. Frontify have released a report, which is about AI and creativity. It’s ungated. You just need to scan that QR code. It’ll head straight there, straight to the PDF. It’s a fabulous resource. They’re interviewing like the head of creative for Canva and people like that. If you want that resource from Frontify, head right there. Also, a big thank you to Exclaimer, Sticky Beak, Plannable, Cambridge Marketing College and Redgate. They keep on supporting the community, which means we can keep on bringing these sessions to you. Now, that’s my introduction done. You guys have already been absolute heroes in the chat feature today. Thank you for doing that. Please keep that going throughout the duration of today’s session. Thank you to Nicole for saying thank you to the wonderful sponsors. That’s really fabulous. We’ve got 19 questions on the list that Ross and I put together. We’ve got 54 minutes at the moment, plus any more that go into the Q&A throughout the duration of today’s session. Let’s get going. Ross, first question that we picked out from the community. What would your advice be to juniors or new people in the industry? How should they be approaching AI?

Speaker 2: Yes, Joe, thanks for inviting me back. Super excited to be back. What an amazing community. Thank you all so much for the love. My first recommendation to anybody who’s new in the wonderful world of AI is to embrace the same thing that brought you here, the same thing that made you decide that you were going to take time out of your day to listen to us talk. It’s that curiosity around what and how this technology of AI can influence your life. Once you have a default state around curiosity, my recommendation then is to go into various places where you can get the information that’s going to allow you to win consistently. What does that mean? It means if you’re a Reddit user, you’re going to subscribe to our ChatGPT. You’re going to find ChatGPT subreddits that are dedicated to prompt engineering and writing great prompts. You’re going to do a little bit of self-research to identify maybe some Slack channels where people are talking about artificial intelligence on a regular basis, and you’re going to join them. Maybe you’re going to be the person within your space who says, I’m going to start a WhatsApp group chat where every day we’re just going to talk about AI. Then you invite some of your colleagues, you invite some of your peers, maybe you invite some people in this marketing meetup session today to join you in that Slack or in that WhatsApp group, and you guys just share and have conversations. You start to follow and create lists on X where you’re subscribed to a handful of people who are talking about AI agents or talking about AI. That would be the starting point for my opinion. Go and find newsletters. It’s very easy to go to Google and type in the best AI newsletters that you should subscribe to and then subscribe to them. Then from there, you’re going to get that information directly delivered to your inbox. Over time, because you’re consuming this information and you have a network of people in a community around you who are talking about this technology and the shifts happening, you’re going to improve and elevate yourself. Then the second and final piece of this all is to be able to take it and apply it to your work. Now, everyone is in a different situation as it relates to their employment. Some of you are self-employed. Some of you might work for an organization. If you’re self-employed, then you have complete control over your ability to use AI in your work. I would encourage you to do it. If you are not self-employed and you are in an organization that embraces and celebrates AI, then congratulations, well done, go do it. If you’re not in an organization that embraces AI, then my recommendation to you would be to start something on the side, a small project, a small experiment with AI that you can start to dabble and play with AI in your own playground, so to speak. What’s going to happen is you’re going to learn and you’re going to build a skill set that will give you the ability to, one, speak more confidently internally around how they should use AI, or set yourself up to get another job at a better place where they actually do embrace AI.

Speaker 1: I love that last line. Thank you, mate. It’s funny because when we speak about the Marketing Meetup community, we never speak about demographics, really. What we speak about is psychographics, and by which that curiosity. not only is the community amazing, but I’d like to think we’re a curious bunch who sort of explore these things. As you rightly said at the beginning, that natural curiosity will take folks a long way. I’m very high on the community right now. They’re just a bunch of very incredible people. Thank you for being that. Fabulous. Thank you for that opening. I love that. That curiosity piece, that positivity, I think is already a counterbalance to some of the negativity that we could see when discussing this topic. Let’s go to the second one, the second question. Regretfully, when I sent through the list to Ross, I didn’t attach people’s names because I didn’t get permission from folks to specifically name them here. I don’t have names, but if you recognize your question, I hope it helps you today. The question is, for someone or a company who isn’t using AI, although I did try to help it write a blog post last week, where would you suggest to start, i.e. programs and for what tasks, et cetera?

Speaker 2: Yes. There’s two tools that should be in every marketer’s toolkit right now. One is ChatGPT and the other is Cloud. Cloud, depending on your accent. These two tools are, in my opinion, the starting point for everyone. You can pick and choose which one you like the most, but both are good. Cloud does have a better LLM today. They recently just rolled out a new version and it’s faster. It has better responses, things like that, and arguably a better user experience. When it comes down to it, what are some things that you can do with these things? My first reco would be that you actually start by understanding what you should not use these things for. What I see a lot of people use AI for that drives me insane is a replication of human work that is strategic, human work that actually requires a level of understanding of the nuance and the culture of humans, or the ability to do things in real time and understand datasets that these LLMs haven’t actually been trained on. What do by that? If you go to AI and you ask it to develop a strategy for you, it’s probably not going to create a great strategy. If you go to AI and you ask it to identify 500 startups that you should connect with and the names of their CEOs, as well as their emails, it’s probably going to give you a bunch of fake emails. It’s probably going to give you wrong names. It’s not going to give you accurate info. If you go to an LLM and you’re like, I want you to do keyword research across all of these different landing pages and identify what is the demand for this query, you’re going to get fake data. I did a test on ChatGPT where I was like, hey, ChatGPT, pretend that we have a pickleball company and what subreddit should we sponsor to get people to buy our pickleball rackets or whatever. ChatGPT gave me five responses. The first one was a subreddit called rpickleball, which does exist. Then they gave pickleball tips, pickleball strategy, pickleball picks. These were some of them. I said, cool, this is amazing. Look at this research that ChatGPT gave me. Then I go out and I actually go to Reddit and I type in these communities, and it turns out that each of them have one subscriber. One subscriber. There’s no one in these communities. They’re not things. Don’t make the mistake of assuming that ChatGPT and LLMs can do all of the things that we can do. It doesn’t have that capability. It doesn’t have the proprietary data. Those things don’t exist. All right. Now, once you understand that, there are things that it can do extremely well. One of my favorite use cases is to upload a report, upload a PDF, something that is in-depth. You could upload the entire Great Gatsby and upload it to ChatGPT or Claude and be like, can you identify all of the funny jokes within this book? Then it will identify the few jokes that exist. Now imagine that from a business lens. You start to download the transcripts from all of the LLMs that you’ve recorded and you upload those transcripts and you say, hey, ChatGPT, can you turn these LLMs into a standard operating procedures guide that takes people through the process that I go through to do a certain task? That’s when the magic happens, because now you can pass that SOP along with your LLMs to new colleagues, with peers, to your own community, whatever, and they can start to follow your task. You say, I’m going to jump on a podcast. I’m going to jump on a webinar and I’m going to talk about my stuff. Then after you’re done, you take that, you take the transcript again, you upload it to these tools and you say, turn what I talked about into a blog post. Then once you get that, don’t make the mistake that most people do, which is copy, paste, press publish. Now I want you to now bring all of your expertise, bring all of your unique lived experience and apply that to the piece that ChatGPT just created. Create an intro that doesn’t start within the ever-evolving digital landscape. Cut it out and speak as you would as a human so you can hook people in and apply AIDA, attention, interest, desire, action. Apply that in your intro and then add in some imagery, add in some third-party quotes, make it an amazing piece and then ship that. Another thing that you can do with these tools is let’s say you have people on your team who are running webinars all the time or are doing podcast interviews. Take those podcasts, upload them to an AI like Claude or ChatGPT and be like, hey, can you identify for me five moments within these interviews where we should chop it up and turn it into a vertical video that’s going to go out on LinkedIn or social media and be shared. Here’s another pro tip. Tell ChatGPT or tell Claude to pretend that they are Ross Simmons. Give it a persona. Give it a persona because at that moment it’s now going to go into its little brain and it’s going to think, how would Ross Simmons approach this? It’s going to read, create once, distribute forever. It’s going to grab my book and like understand my thinking around distribution. Then it’s going to give you the moments that you should chop up based off of that. You can tell it to be specific. Give me the timestamps. Tell me what the intro should be. Give me a few ideas on what the caption should be for these pieces. That is where ChatGPT will be able to support you and give you some great wins. That was a long answer to a short question, but I hope there’s some nuggets in there that

Speaker 1: could help folks. Right. Absolutely. There really isn’t. I wouldn’t consider myself a complete novice on these platforms, but there was stuff that I could take away right there. Let’s also acknowledge the chat feature, which you’ve started off, I’m afraid, a pickleball slash picklebar chat. People have been going rogue.

Speaker 2: I might have said picklebar. Who knows? Y’all just don’t know what I’m saying.

Speaker 1: We got on the pickle, as Dean says. Very good. Let’s take the third question, which is starting to go over the ground, which you just covered, but we’re going to ask it in a slightly different way because this question is more about prompting. This question asks, I’d like to use AI to help write blog content, and I’ve tried several different platforms. However, I’m finding the copy it’s churning out really vague, very fluffy and overly superlative and just lacking expert opinions plus interest. Is there anything I could be doing better in my prompts? Now, I suggest that you’ve probably covered quite a lot of the ground in

Speaker 2: your previous answer, but there is. There’s a few different tools that you can use that will make your life a lot easier. One of the things that I encourage people to do is recognize like the AI is built on the back of all of the human content that has ever been created. Because there’s a lot of us, there’s a lot of bad content because not everybody is a copywriter, right? Because not everybody is a copywriter, we have some content that’s just bad. You’re going to get average content from an AI tool today. You fast forward five years, I think we’re going to be in a different world, but today we’re going to get average content. How do you make it better? I think you need to start with intentionally crafting prompts that are very specific and not average in nature, right? We have a piece I’m going to link to it called about prompt engineering that is all about the actual concept of prompt engineering. The way that I would think about it if I was trying to craft a blog post is how can I give a brief and a rundown to the AI that is so in-depth that there’s no room for error? The way that you should treat it is the same way that you would ideally brief a writer on your team. You’re not just going to say, hey, ChatGPT, can you write me a blog post about marketing strat automation? That’s not what you’re going to do. Instead, you’re going to, and I’m going to get very tactical on this. The prompt that I would use would be more like a chained command. I would start with one initial prompt where I’m saying, hey, ChatGPT, hey, Claude, you are a digital marketing expert who specializes in SEO. The reason why I’m saying that is because I wanted to use best practices for digital marketing and SEO. You have been hired by, and then I’m going to insert the brand name. Now they go out and they start to understand the brand. A brand that loves to create content that goes into these three categories, educational content, engaging content, and very in-depth content. Now I’m giving it a few parameters to work with. Then I would say, please develop for me a brief that would cover a blog post that is 2,500 words, considered one of the best in class assets and incorporates a blend between thought leadership ideas from third parties, as well as real world examples and practical advice. Then I would say, bring that to life for me. Now I’ve got the brief. ChatGPT, Claude is going to develop a brief for me. At this point, the brief might have some holes. Continue to have that conversation. Say, can you add this? Can you modify this? Can you adjust this? You have a brief. Then your next prompt is going to be, great. Thank you so much for bringing this. You always be nice to your AI. I don’t want it to come back to life someday and actually come and get me. I’m going to say, thanks so much. Then I’m going to have a prompt that actually says to the AI, I want you to pretend that you are a writer for, insert great publication that has your voice and your tone, et cetera. You specialize in ensuring that your content is always top notch. Your intros follow this formula, AIDA. You always conclude with an inspirational call to action. For example, these are two call to actions that you might want to use. When you dive into this brief, make sure that you’re including third-party resources and things like that, and then ask it to fill in the brief. What you’re going to find is that it’s going to do a much better job than if you just started with, hey, can you write me a blog post on this title idea? Then once you have that, most people would say, let’s press publish and call it a day. No. You’re now going to edit that piece, modify it, adjust it, add your own experience, and then take it from a 8.5 to a 10, because you want to create something that’s great.

Speaker 1: I love that. This isn’t necessarily the focus of today’s session, but your whole methodology, right? you’ve got the book behind you, by the way, Ross asked me to plug the book, but like Ross’ whole methodology, create once, distribute forever. You’re not going to distribute something that you think is a six, you want to be at your 10. You feel like you can speak about it again and again and again and again.

Speaker 2: I want to call it Demi’s comment. Demi mentioned that oftentimes it will forget. Most recently, the most recent version of ChachiPT, they just rolled over memory. You are a hundred percent spot on. AI, two months ago, forgot everything. It was very quick to forget. Now there’s this memory segment that when you’re using ChachiPT, you won’t notice it will say stored in memory. You want it to use that functionality. I think you might have to be on a paid version. I will throw that out there, but there is a memory feature that now stores it. There’s also a tool called Jasper, which we use at Foundation, which allows you to upload brand guidelines and like the requirements of your tools upfront, which is extremely valuable in my opinion for brands. I would encourage you to check that out as well. We have, again, another guide that is built all around how to use Jasper. I would encourage you to read that if you’re trying to figure it out. The templates and the brand voice guidelines in there give you the ability to really control the way that this story goes. What you can do with Jasper is you can actually upload your website URL. It will scrape your content, identify the voice and the tone that you typically use. Then it’s going to give you a suggestion around what it believes your tone is. Then you can say, yes, no, I agree. I disagree. Things like that. I encourage you to

Speaker 1: check that out as well. That’s perfect. Thank you. You’re the man with the guide for everything, which is- I try. I think, to very quickly pick up on one of the points that Berenice has made in the chat. She says, same, I asked for an output in table form in chat GPT and it did the first half in the table, but not the second. I guess that’s a little bit about what you’re speaking about here as well, which is that conversational element. I’m not saying this will solve it necessarily because these tech are far from perfect, but like, no, that’s not right. you need the second half in the table or whatever it may be. Hopefully that would help Berenice. I don’t know for sure, but like these conversational platforms hopefully would get it. Let’s go into the next question because you’ve been fabulous so far. You’re so practical, mate. Thank you. The question says, when will big multimillion dollar brands be able to use AI for their video ads without having to worry about IP and the reliability of their

Speaker 2: content, of the content? Yesterday. They were, they were allowed yesterday. It is happening. Toys R Us, which I don’t know if it’s in an ad, which was essentially 100% created using artificial intelligence where they told the story of the founder being a kid falling in love with the giraffe stuffed animal, and then turning that into Toys R Us as we know it today. Then it was a launch of Toys R Us inside of Macy’s or something like that. Billion dollar brands using AI to tell this story. There is nothing holding you back from leveraging these technologies today to create video content and running ads with them. It’s happening. I would be very surprised if come the Super Bowl, one of the top ads is created 100% with AI in 2024, 2025. I’d be very surprised if that didn’t happen. When it comes down to it, the question becomes, what about the legalities, et cetera. You have to be careful what AI tools you’re using. Each AI platform has its own rules and regulations around how it’s creating video content and what it’s been trained on. Some of the most trusted sources would be places like Adobe, who has very strict licensing agreements with publishers and media properties and media entities to ensure that every video that they create in their suite is built off of IP that they control and that they have a license agreement too. You can use it as you wish. That all said, there are constraints that happen when you have those types of agreements and you actually follow the law, right? Your content and stuff isn’t always going to be that good. You can’t go to them and be like, Hey, can you create something with Ryan Reynolds and get Ryan Reynolds? It’s not going to happen. You can, if you use some of the more scrappy startup video AIs that are coming up from the abyss, so to speak, because they’re training on everything. I wouldn’t recommend a multi-billion dollar company use those tools because of the risk. If I was in the seat, I would 100% be looking at leveraging the technologies that are coming out of more of the established creative platforms like Adobe and using those. Love it. Thank you. Karen has

Speaker 1: popped some examples of different platforms which enable you to create on. I’m going to pop it there just because Karen has popped it to some panelists in this case, but thank you, Karen,

Speaker 2: for sharing that. I think one of the things we did last time, and I had to do it again, I shared a song. I shared a song last time, which was about me. I’ve done it again. While we were here, I decided that I was going to make a song about this being my three P for a while. I don’t know if it will be any good. I have not listened to it, but I’ve been using Suno, S-U-N-O.com to create songs. It’s wild. Within seconds, you can just give it a prompt. It will create music. This one’s a country track. Again, I haven’t listened to it. I don’t know.

Speaker 3: The last one was really good. The last one was amazing.

Speaker 1: You’ve been doing it again. That’s incredible. Let’s head to, okay, we’ve got Kerry saying, oh, my God, this is awesome. We’re doing all right. The next question, is the upgrade to ChatGPT4 worth it from a member of the community? The upgrade is 100% worth it.

Speaker 2: It should pay for itself. I honestly believe that for anyone who uses it, this tool should pay for itself in a matter of weeks, days, even. The reason why you can make it pay for itself is you get the most valuable thing in life back in time. If you get your time back, then you are getting ROI out of the asset, whether you’re employed or not. It’s like if you get more time back, that might mean that you can get off earlier on the weekend. That might mean that you can finish your tasks earlier. That might mean if you’re self-employed, that you can do more, get more capital, get more revenue, blah, all those different things. You can get a promotion, all that stuff. To me, it’s 100% worth it. Back in the day, when I first got into the world of advertising and marketing, my cheat code was finding out that you can go on sites like Fiverr and have people debug things for like five bucks. I was like, oh, if anybody at the company needs something debugged, just come to me. I was willing to use my own $5 to pay for that because I looked so good in front of everybody else. AI is that again, where you are able to do things faster than everyone else around you and unlock some amazing returns. I encourage people to do

Speaker 1: it. Nice. Fabulous. Thank you. Folks, I can see that some, we’ve got Vanessa, James and Anonymous who have contributed to the questions to the Q&A. I just want to put a pin in there that I’ve noticed that, and we will get to additional questions as we get towards the end of the session. If you’ve got questions that come in that you’d like answered in today’s session, pop them in the Q&A and we’ll do our best to cover off after we’ve covered the most frequently asked questions from the community today. Next question, what advice would you give to graduates or people starting in the industry who are competing against the roles AI can support?

Speaker 2: Yes, you have to recognize that like you’re not, you are at a disadvantage. Let’s just accept it. You’re at a disadvantage because the AI technology has a lot of knowledge, has a lot of insight. How can you compete with it? You don’t. You just augment yourself with it. You become better than everybody else who’s sitting on the sidelines, ignoring it by embracing these technologies. You go deep though, in one area where you can specialize. There’s this concept called the T-shaped marketer, where you essentially have enough to be deadly across a bunch of things. You’re a little bit good at content, a little bit good at SEO, a little bit good at PPC, but you’re really good at content repurposing, let’s say. You go super deep into that. You’re good at repurposing for TikTok, repurposing for X, repurposing for LinkedIn. You can repurpose content across any different channel. If you can become excellent at that one thing, and you can layer AI on top of that one thing, you’re going to be ridiculously valuable for the rest of your career. Now, here’s something to keep in mind. The T-shaped marketer covers true practical skills as marketers. I believe we have to evolve the T-shaped marketer a bit and put like a whole nother group of traits at the bottom that are ridiculously important. Those are things like being a good teammate, being good with verbal communication, being curious, being good at managing budgets, like the soft skills, so to speak. When you can start to build those things with a deep understanding of something and sprinkle AI all over it, I believe you’re going to be unstoppable. Yes, there’s a lot of doom and gloom out there in the industry of marketers aren’t going to get a good shot and juniors aren’t going to get a good shot, et cetera. The cat’s out of the bag, folks. Life goes on. The future is coming and the future is here. You can only make one of two choices. Either you sit back and you complain and you say like this AI thing is hurting my career, my path, et cetera. You can say this AI thing is here and I’m going to do something about it, aka I’m going to apply it to myself and I’m going to try to get better. You can take a whole different ballgame and be like, look, I’m realizing that this thing is changing the way that this world works, this industry works. I’m going to become in the wonderful world of blue collar work because everybody’s still going to need their sink fixed. Everybody’s still going to need their roof fixed. You just get out of the industry entirely. I’m cool with that, too. At the end of the day, AI is going to fundamentally change marketing. It’s going to make it much more difficult for junior folks to get in. The best way to get in is to focus on filling out that T and then building that foundation with like the soft skills as well. That’s just not sugarcoating it. That’s the only way to do it in today’s market.

Speaker 1: Thank you, mate. I think there’s something to it. It’s easy to give an easy answer sometimes. It’s harder to give the harder answer by definition. Thank you for sharing that. Let’s go to the next question. Acknowledging the stuff about IP that we’ve spoken about already today. The next question comes in from a member of the community who asks for visuals. Can you send it a reference and say a cross between these two styles, please?

Speaker 2: Yes, you can. I love this use case. With AI, you’re able with Chachi Petit or Cloud Today, you’re able to upload visuals and graphics and imagery and ask it to bring to life anything that you can imagine. This is the most magical thing with AI today, in my opinion. As an example, one thing that folks in the US do a lot is they wear like the American flag everywhere. It’s all on their T-shirts, all on their hats. It’s everywhere you go. I was like, that’s a US thing. I wonder what like a Canadian who loves their Canadian flag so much would have for a jacket. I was like, Chachi Petit, here’s a picture of an American wearing all their stuff. Here’s a picture of a very cool jacket that it was just like a varsity style. What would a Canadian version look like? Within the matter of seconds, Chachi Petit analyzed two images, identified and did research on nuances about Canada. They picked up the Canadians like hockey, the beaver, all of this stuff, the maple leaf, red and white. They picked all this up. Then they created, in my opinion, one of the coolest jackets that I have ever seen. It was like this black jacket that had the big Canada flag. It had like people playing hockey on it. It was awesome. It was amazing. I was able to do that in the matter of seconds. Why does this matter for marketers? In the past, I would have had to hire a designer. I would have had to hire probably a creative director and somebody to lead the project. I would have had to hire an illustrator or someone to go out and create that content. Now I can go to Chachi Petit, upload two visuals of reference, use my own creativity and imagination to say what I’m wanting and hoping for, and it will give it back to me. Now I know 100% that some of you might be thinking that’s horrible for the designers. It is. Do what else was horrible? It was horrible when we automated the bowling alleys that started to take the jobs of the people who used to set up all the pins at the back of the bowling alley. That was horrible too. We continued and we evolved and now nobody thinks about those jobs anymore. I’m not saying designers are going to vanish because I still think taste is important. I think designers have a key role in the marketing function, but things change. For marketers to be able to mock up ideas, to be able to mock up a quick website, to mock up a graphic and add a visual in a matter of seconds, to remove a background with the click of a button, instead of now having to get a graphic, somebody on their graphic design team to remove the background, like all of these things can now be done in a matter of seconds. The productivity and efficiency gains are wild, and we need to embrace them. We need to celebrate them. We need to use them. If we are the folks who are having our work in many ways changed and evaporated because of it, let’s start thinking about where they show up in a way that is more meaningful for our companies, for our teams, for our organizations, so we can all win. We all want to provide a livelihood and do our work that we get passionate about. We do have to think differently because the change is here.

Speaker 1: Thank you, Matt. Let’s head into, you were referencing, in fact the chat have been referencing while you’ve been speaking through that answer right now, asking about courses and resources and places where you go to learn. I’m going to skip ahead a few questions because it’s pertinent to the folks asking in the chat right now, people like Cicely, Donna, Vanessa, and Zoe. Where do you go to stay on top of the latest tech in this area, where there’s sort of less noise and more sort of practical grounded stuff that’s actually useful?

Speaker 2: Yes, so there’s a few places that I go on a regular basis to get my insight and info. The first thing that I do is, it’s boring to most people, but like I’m on X all the time still, subscribing to people who have podcasts and who have content that are on the topic of AI. I follow those individuals on a regular basis. I go into the subreddits that are dedicated to artificial intelligence. I spend a lot of time in there. I’ll send one of the subreddits. Let’s see. There it is. ChatGPT, their subreddit itself is gold. I spend a lot of time in there. There is a subreddit that’s dedicated to AGI as well, which is fascinating. I spend a lot of time in that. I also followed Brittany Mueller. I’m not sure if anyone’s familiar with Brittany and her work, but she’s a brilliant mind in the wonderful world of AI. I follow a lot of the stuff that she does. We created a course on AI. It’s called the AI Marketing Console that we keep active all the time that folks can definitely check out. It gets updated. We provide a bunch of tactical resources on how to use it, how to leverage AI. There’s a few newsletters that I subscribe to, and I’m trying to pull them up. That’s why I’m looking over here, that are absolutely brilliant and add a lot of value to my inbox on a regular basis. For some reason, I don’t know. Let me answer Katya’s question in the chat while you’re looking,

Speaker 1: because it’s Brittany Mueller. She has recently released a course, I think, called AI for Novices. I can’t quite remember. Maybe I’m misquoting that. Likewise, Heather Murray is another great source who sort of does AI for non-techies, who’s another fabulous person to follow. Thank you, Catherine, for popping in the chat feature right there, Brittany’s

Speaker 2: information. I would encourage folks to check out the Facebook groups. There’s Facebook groups that are dedicated to AI that I would encourage people to check out. You can get a lot of value out of those. I find that communities are one of the best places to go. When you can find a few communities where your ICP are spending time, or not even your ICP, just people in general are talking about this stuff, that’s a goldmine for finding great content. In terms of finding these folks,

Speaker 1: with the example of the Facebook groups, are you literally just popping into the

Speaker 2: feature? Yes, so I do. There’s also one other item that I do that’s a little bit of interesting. There’s communities where you’ll find people who are specialized in a certain thing in AI. I would go to a Facebook group and type in AI writers, or Jasper. Then I would find the community where a bunch of people are using Jasper. Then I’d join that group and start to just follow the conversations, or chat GPT power users, find those chat GPT power users, and then connect with them and learn what they’re talking about, and use that as an insight around how I should approach things. One of the other newsletters, I found one, is called the Neuron Daily. Subscribe to that one and get a ton of value out of their newsletter on a regular basis. I find it to be very interesting, very practical. Lots of value comes out of that one. There’s also one called Next Tool AI. Next Tool AI is a newsletter that essentially keeps you in the loop on all the different tools that are valuable. It gives you some examples of good prompts, how to write them, things like that. I would say check out Foundation. We publish a lot of content on this stuff as well, so subscribe there. Then I’d also throw one other piece, which is twofold. Another one is called AI Valley. I get a lot of value out of that. Then the other thing would be sign up for the newsletters of these various AI tools. Sign up for the HeyGen AI newsletter. HeyGen is a AI tool that I’m a big fan of and have talked a lot about. I ran an experiment. I’ll talk about this for a second. HeyGen is the wildest AI that I think I’ve actually come across in my life. It was scary. I ran an experiment last week where I took two videos and I wanted to, I’m going to show it to you all. I’ll share it as well. I took two videos. I looked into this camera, this exact same setup. I said, in the future, you’re not going to know what’s real and what’s fake. Then I got HeyGen. I uploaded my transcript from that video to HeyGen and I got it to record the same thing. Then I uploaded those two videos and I asked my community, the people who I’m connected with, which one is me? Literally almost no one got it right. Everyone thought that the AI version of me was the real version of me. I’ll share it in the chat. Here’s the link to it. You’re all probably in a state where you’re not going to any more see like, oh, you’re probably not at a state where you’ll be like, oh, number one is not Ross because I’ve given away the spoiler, but like people couldn’t figure it out. I encourage you to check it out. Now I see a comment about the accents. Good point. Here’s the thing though. With HeyGen, you’re able to integrate it with Eleven Labs. Eleven Labs is an audio AI tool that I use to replicate my voice because it doesn’t pick up the abuts. It’s like, doesn’t get the Canadian thing if you use HeyGens, like their native one. I encourage people to use Eleven Labs. It’s a great tool. I had a list of like the top 80 audio AI tools that I use. Just share that in the links below. Eleven Labs is number one for me. It picks up the Canadian accent. It’s gold. It’s a beautiful tool. I highly encourage you to check it out. Where was I going with that? Oh, subscribe to tools, newsletters, and they’ll give you updates. Now one last thing that I just started to figure out, and I haven’t spent as much time there because I am a busy person, but if I was new in the world of business and marketing and just getting into this, I would spend every day in the open AI community. The open AI community is a wild opportunity. I built my entire career off of communities. Early days, I went into growthhackers.com, inbound.org, Traffic Think Tank, all these little places where marketers were spending time and I added as much value as I could. If I didn’t have a bunch of like other priorities and three kids, I would be in this community every single day answering questions and learning from people who are playing with this technology. They have an entire section on prompting where people are just like having conversations about what a good prompt looks like, how should you be prompting, all of these things. Absolute gold, folks. Again, I know I’m getting really tactical here, but like if you go into that community and you sort the content by top posts, you can find some ridiculously valuable insights around how people are writing great prompts, all of those things. To the next comment, how do you deal with the overwhelming amount of information? You just exist overwhelmed. You just exist.

Speaker 3: Embrace the overwhelm.

Speaker 2: do. You just have to embrace the overwhelm. No, this gets like into a professional question and dialogue. I think you just have to figure out a way to turn off. You just have to be okay with figuring out your own personal ways of turning off. For everybody, that’s different. Some of us have forced reasons to turn off, aka crying babies and stuff like that. That’s a great way for me. If you took me back into my 20s, the only way I would have turned off would have been if I had like activities and things like that on the go. Yes, exactly. I probably would. Back in my 20s, I was playing dodgeball. Yes, you want to find something to keep your mind off of it and just go from there.

Speaker 1: 100%. We got Demi in the chat saying, you just exist overwhelmed. I feel seen. We’ve got Martin saying, winging it. That’s fabulous. I think we can all relate to that. We’re starting to get to a point where with the questions that we’ve taken from the community that we’re starting to sort of, I think we’ve covered quite a lot of the ground. There is one more sort of section of questions which sort of sits around the transparency of creating stuff using AI, when to use things that have been created by AI, whether you have to disclose, that something has been used by AI. When something that has been created by AI, which ultimately combines an amalgamation of sources, at one point, that becomes quote, unquote, original. There’s about four questions here verbalized in different ways to that theme. Where do you sit presently on that sort of disclosure point and that originality point when it comes to content creation,

Speaker 2: using these means? Yes, I stand on the point of the only moment in which disclosure should be a requirement is if it’s is a few areas in which disclosure makes sense to me. One is if you are taking on the likeness of another person, or using the audio voice of another person. You’re making them say things that are not like, actually have ever come out of their mouth. I’m not talking about you as yourself, but other people. If you’re using someone else’s likeness, someone else’s voice, then I think there should be a level of disclosure. In all other circumstances, for the most part, I think it’s fine. The reason why I think it’s fine is because like, we don’t have to disclose when we use spellcheck. We don’t have to disclose when we use grammarly. Right now, as we’re sitting here, there’s probably an AI that is touching up our faces. You probably always look this good. It’s like scanning my face and like making sure that my complexion is right. I don’t think I need to disclose that. I also don’t even know if it’s happening. You probably don’t either. Elements of it, I don’t think need to be. I think if you look at it comes down to your own personal choice, right? I think if you are going to be pressing publish on written content that is assisted with AI, you don’t need to. If it is completely AI, then I think it might be a good call. I think that’s the difference, right? To me, the level of disclosure should be capped at the level in which you use AI to create a certain thing. If something is 100% AI developed, then sure, it’s probably a good thing to disclose it. If you use AI to fix some things and edit some things and modify some things, I don’t think you need to disclose it. At the end of the day, the reality is, at a certain point, no one’s going to know. You’re not going to be able to tell. You can’t tell today based off, from my opinion, most people today can’t tell what is a AI generated image versus what is a AI or a real photo that someone has taken. I’ve run the test multiple times. I’ve taken, gotten AI to take a picture of a burger. Which one is real? Which one is fake? No one knows. Which apple pie is real? Which one is fake? No one knows. Should you disclose it? I don’t think so. I don’t think so. It doesn’t matter, in my opinion. It’s like, a burger is a burger. If we perceive it as a burger, then it’s a burger. I don’t think it matters that much. Yes. There’s,

Speaker 1: there’s such a bevy of, I think folks are figuring this out as well. James has popped in the, in the chat, which says University of Cambridge social team a good document process on their use and disclosure and on AI on their work. I wonder if this stuff will keep changing as tools get more ubiquitous. I remember Nicole, who was one of our other speakers in the AI season, who’s actually in the chat today, was a big proponent and put together an AI policy as well. For your company and organization, and you referenced that at the beginning of today’s session, that different companies are going to approach it differently. It’s an interesting thing. I think even, I want to pick up on Mary Rose, who speaks to EU AI acts and stuff like that. This is such a fast moving pace. It’s great to have your perspective on that. Thank you.

Speaker 2: Yes. I think it’s like, one of the things that’s interesting is like, I do think legally, there’s going to be more and more restrictions that come out that take, some are going to be for the right purposes. I think some are going to actually have a negative impact on innovation at large. I think there is positives that can come out of it, like the legislation that recently came out that said, you can’t use a dead artists, like sound and likeness without connecting with like their estate and getting their sign off. I think that makes a lot of sense. I think it makes a lot of sense that we own our own likeness. Some people are already licensing their likeness on tools like hey, Jen, fascinating times to be alive, right? Those are things that people can do right now. It’ll be interesting to see, like how it all comes to life. I love the fact that governments are thinking about it,

Speaker 1: that they’re talking about it. Yes, that’s important. 100%. That’s, we’re figuring out this stuff together, which is exciting. let’s head into the live q&a, because there’s 10 open questions right now I can see from folks. I would encourage folks to give a thumbs up to any questions that you like in the q&a, just to make sure that I prioritize those in the last seven minutes that we’ve got. By the way, thank you, Ross, because this is a marathon, moving your headspace from one place to another. Thank you, first and foremost for the mental agility, but also the practicality. I think there was a big comment earlier in the chat feature who said we love tactical. You’ve delivered that. I don’t think we’ve ever had so many resources delivered in a single session. This question comes in from Vanessa, who, this was around the point earlier on where you were speaking about prompting and improving the output from your chat GPT or Claude. You mentioned about uploading documents to these platforms where eventually your output would become better. Right. Vanessa asked, I worry about uploading my own content to GPT or Claude, even if it’s not private. Can you trust the don’t nick my stuff setting? Am I being

Speaker 2: overly cautious? Yes, it’s a great question. I think I think you can trust it. I think if there is ever any type of sign that the AI tool is then passing it off to other people, then I would say I would be very likely to say, welcome to the class action lawsuit, buckle up, you’re going to get paid. That’s a good. If you were that nervous, then I would advise that you don’t use Claude or chat GPT, but instead maybe just go and find an open source LLM. It’s a little bit more technical and will require a little bit work. You can install these types of things directly on your own desktop now and run it on your own servers, on your own systems and own all of the data. You don’t have to run into the potential risk that you’re that you’re talking about. I would do that. I would also look at tools like Jasper, because, again, like with those, they have in their terms of agreement that they’re not going to pass your information off to other people. I’m going to go real fast because we have a lot of questions and I want to see if that would be my thoughts there. That’s perfect. Thank you, mate. Let’s take the

Speaker 1: next one from James, because I think we have already spoken about AI’s impact on the job market. I just wanted to acknowledge Berenice’s question, because I think that speaks to that. Because we’ve already spoken about it, I think we’ll move to the next question, which comes from James. James asks, how do you communicate the value of AI tools to, quote unquote, AI Luddites, those who are skeptical or critical of the technology, think it can’t be trusted, et cetera, et cetera. Yes, so it’s better to always show

Speaker 2: than to tell. My way of communicating the power and the value of AI tools would be to show them how it can be used to do things much more fast, much more efficiently, more effectively, et cetera. If that still doesn’t work, then I would show them through journals and papers. There’s tons of documentation that exists online where studies have been done that show that using AI has had a increase in productivity within the white-collar world, but also within hospitals, within radiology rooms, within a lot of different spaces. If the people are still Luddites after seeing that AI is able to identify cancer before a human eye, then you probably should find some different people to work with. Because the reality is this technology is saving more lives. It’s giving us the ability to do more things. It should have the same impact on a marketer. If a doctor can use AI to be a better physician and doctor and deal with health, then we can probably do the same thing when we’re moving pixels around on a computer screen. That would

Speaker 1: be my conversation with them. Yes, I love that. One Surat has put in the chat, definitely, show not tell. I think that’s wonderful advice. Thank you. The next one, much like the favorite sources question, could be quite a long answer here. The question comes in from anonymous, who says, what are the best free tools beyond chat GPT?

Speaker 2: Oh, good one. There’s not a lot of them are paid to play. The only free tools that I would advise and be able to strongly recommend would be like the ones that you have to know a little bit of code to use. It’s like you have to install it on your own systems. Nothing is anything that is free is probably taking your data. I would be very scared to use the free things unless it’s chat GPT. You can have fun with things like rock, which is built into x.

Speaker 1: Yes. Even then, that’s like a subscription, isn’t it? that but I think that’s actually right. To be fair, that’s probably a really solid principle bit of advice there, which is a reminder that if you are getting it for free, you are probably the product or the product. A hundred percent. Yes. A hundred percent. Yes. Yes, great point. Thank you for that, because I think it is a really solid reminder. It’s worth reminding or thinking at least with the likes of GPT. I think it’s twenty dollars a month or twenty pounds a month. I can’t write. You’d hope that within that is relatively accessible. I appreciate not accessible for everybody, but as a as a starting place that gives you access to a whole bunch of things. Then everything else sort of starts to become a bit of an add on from that point, from my perspective, at the very least. As we head towards the end, Ross, you’re going to need to lie down after this. Let’s go to this last one from Martine, who asked the question. This is a far more personal reflection on AI. Martine asks, how do you get over the feeling of almost cheating using AI, even if you’re not using everything that AI gives you, but rather getting ideas from it? Yes. I think you get over it by

Speaker 2: recognizing that it’s not that you’re I don’t view it as cheating. I view it as a augmentation of myself and a partner. Right. If you if you view it as a person, let’s pretend it’s a person and you’re the conductor, you’re essentially just delegating tasks and you’re getting someone to help you with tasks. We wouldn’t view that as cheating. We would view that as a good collaboration between you and someone else. I think with that mindset and perspective of I’m going to use AI as an intern, I’m going to use AI as a brainstorming partner, then it’s no longer cheating. My biggest mental framework around this is that if you use a calculator in business, are you cheating? If you use Excel in business, are you cheating? No, I think you’re just using a tool to your advantage to get to where you want to be. To me, that is perfectly Okay. If you went back into time 15 years, 20 years, I’m sure there’s a lot of people who would have wished that they could have this technology right at their fingertips and. We have it, so why not use it at the end of the day, time is going to go on whether we like it or not. Our competitors are using it, people that we’re going after similar jobs for are using it. It’s an equalizer that we should all embrace, in my opinion.

Speaker 1: I appreciate that. There’s a great chat comment that came here from Bizhan who says, maybe a parallel from the art world, did the first photographers feel like cheaters versus a painter? How would that have changed over time? It’s a really nice analogy, actually. Thank you for contributing that. Martin says, such a good answer. I feel more at ease. Thank you. That’s a lovely way to bring to a close a blooming roller coaster of a session. Ross, thank you for spending the time with us, for doing the hour and working between so many different topics in so many different spaces. That was really fabulous. As Vanessa says, I’ve grown very skeptical of webinars lately, but that was a ton of fun. I appear to have about 20 tabs to investigate afterwards. Thank you for making it available. You’re very welcome. Thank you, Ross, because you’re an absolute legend. If you’d like to connect with Ross, then the QR code is right up there right now to say thank you. I hope your inbox is full for many days on LinkedIn with people saying thank you, because you deserve it. Also, a big thank you to our featured sponsor for today. They are Frontify. Again, if you would like their report on AI and creativity, then the QR code is right there. We’ll also put in the follow up email. A big thank you to Frontify Exclaimer, Sticky Beak, Plannable, Cambridge Martin College at Redgate for bringing today’s session. Finally, next week, we’re heading into a brand new season where we’re going to be asking non-marketers to speak to our marketing community about the things that they wish we knew as marketers about their roles, the key concepts, and how we can work with them best. Next week is all about finance, which is wild for our marketing community, but I think a lot of fun. Ross, you’re a hero, mate. Thank you for taking the time. Thank you to everyone in the community for such a wonderful session. Yes, as you say, Ross, how do this wasn’t my AI here? We don’t. You’re a legend. I appreciate you, Josh. Thanks so much. Cheers, mate. Have a great one.

Speaker 3: Take care. Bye-bye.