The Skills AI Cannot Touch (And How to Build Them) — with Vi Wickam

0:00Vi Wickam:You don't need to have a job, but you do need marketable skills. You need to be good at things people are willing to spend money on. What's going to change, I think, is what role the humans play, and it's going to be the emotional work, it's going to be the hand-holding, and it's going to be the things that require physicality.

0:23Paul Estes:Today's guest has one of the most unconventional career paths I've ever come across. He's a four-time Colorado state fiddling champion whose album hit number one on the Folk Alliance radio chart. It comes from a family of musicians going back generations. His great, great, great uncle wrote the song that became Elvis Presley's Love Me Tender. And somehow, in parallel to all of that, he spent 30 years in digital marketing, generating great results for his clients. What makes Vi Wickham generally fascinating to me is that he's built an entire business philosophy around something he calls a transparency revolution.

0:58Paul Estes:The idea that honest marketing always wins in the long term, that clients should own their own data, and traditional agency model is fundamentally broken. I wanted to talk to Vi because his story says something important about expertise in the age of AI, about what it means to master multiple crafts and why the future of work might belong to people who refuse to choose just one path. Bye, welcome to Expert Intelligence. Thank you, Paul. It's a pleasure to be here. Hey, when your team reached out and mentioned that you are a nationally ranked fiddle player who was also in digital marketing and knew about AI, it caught my attention.

1:33Paul Estes:And the idea that you come from a family who helped Elvis Presley write Love Me Tender. I've seen a trend in my career of very successful leaders who are also talented musicians playing bands and play instruments. True.

1:47Vi Wickam:What do the two have in common? Well, the first thing that music and all other types of success have in common is you have to learn to listen. And you also have to be willing to be disciplined. because music is one of those things where there's an element of it where you have to spend large quantities of time by yourself doing hard things, you know, on your own, self-motivated at some point. I mean, our parents can kick us in the butt so long, but you know, that only works till we're 12 or 13 and then we're bigger than our parents and you're on your own at that point. It also teaches community.

2:26Vi Wickam:It teaches so many elements that are fundamental for success in other fields. In fact, when I teach my fiddle lessons, because I've been teaching fiddle students since I was 14, the approach I take is that everything you face in music, you will face in your real life, you know, outside of music. So if you're facing something you're afraid of musically, and you face it down and you conquer that thing, you will be able to conquer things in real life better from that point on. You know, if you're being shy and you conquer that by performing music publicly, you have now faced that fear publicly and you've won.

3:13Paul Estes:One of the things that if you read all of the news articles about AI and, hey, what traits do we need? What are the things, the skills that'll help us? Yeah. Hard work is one of them. But the other one is agency. Yeah. You talked about that. The idea that I wake up and I take agency and I do something. When you look at yourself or we were just talking about your daughter.

3:35Vi Wickam:Yeah.

3:36Paul Estes:What are the things that you lean on when you wake up and you say, hey, I'm ready to take on a hard thing?

3:43Vi Wickam:Well, that's a good question. It's a challenge because it's so easy to do the things that don't really matter that can keep you busy. And when you're self-employed, when you've spent your entire adult life self-employed, you know that you have to do the things that make a difference. And those are the things that are hard. So if I choose that today, I'm creating those exponential bits that push me forward, that propel me towards a successful outcome. And if I choose those things that are easy, that are comfortable, I can swim in my own poo for years without making any progress. Let's talk about choices.

4:25Paul Estes:You studied computer engineering in college, but you were in music performance before that. So I'm trying to imagine when you were sitting there in music performance and you're like, let me check out engineering. Tell me about that fork in the road.

4:39Vi Wickam:Well, for me, engineering has always been about solving problems and figuring things out. And I've always been driven by mystery and being challenged. And, you know, whether that challenge comes in the form of competing on the national level in fiddle contests, or that challenge comes in the form of, this is a problem that hasn't been solved yet. And how are we going to solve that? that challenge is one of my big drivers. And there never really was that moment of giving up music for engineering. It was really the kind of thing where I was driven to do both all along. And when I went to college, I started out as a double major in music performance and computer engineering.

5:29Vi Wickam:And about two months in, I thought, this is terrible. I had two hours a night of engineering homework. I was studying viola in college. My viola professor wanted me to practice two hours every night. And I also wanted to have some fun. I was in college. I'm on my own. I'm free. Do I want to be spending four hours every night studying? And so I went to the guidance counselor and I was like, this is terrible. I don't want to study and practice four hours every night. And she said, well, you didn't have to pick the two most demanding degrees we offer. And I was like, oh, I kind of did. That's kind of how I am.

6:10Vi Wickam:But on contemplation, what I decided was that nobody cares if you have a degree in music. So I could take the ensembles and I could study music theory and I could play in bands. I could play in rock bands and I could play in the jazz band and I could still play in the orchestra. And it didn't matter whether I had a degree in music or not. But it does matter in engineering. if I wanted a job in engineering, it mattered if I had a degree. So that was why I completed the degree in engineering and ended up two credit hours shy of a minor in music.

6:46Paul Estes:One of the things you've said in your writing is that musicians make great marketers because it's an art of reading the audience. Yeah. Unpack that for me.

6:57Vi Wickam:So anytime you're performing in music, It's a communication. It's a communication between the members of the band and each other. It's a communication between the band and the audience. And if you're tone deaf as a musician, and I don't mean literally tone deaf, but that would be even worse. But if you're not reading the audience and you're not paying attention to the feedback that you're getting from the audience, you're going to proceed in a direction where nobody's going to follow you. You're going to proceed in a direction that nobody wants to listen to you anymore. And I've had those situations where I was playing with someone who really was in their own world and they were playing their own stuff.

7:40Vi Wickam:And it's no fun when you pass a lick to them and you want them to hand something back to you. And there's nothing there. And when you're doing marketing, that same kind of dynamic happens between the customer and the company. And that brand conversation, if the brand's not listening to what the customer is saying and it's falling on deaf ears, you've created a situation where there is no brand. You don't have a relational brand. You have a logo and you have colors and you have a style guide, but you don't have a brand. You don't have connection with your customers. You have a broadcast of crap that nobody wants to listen to.

8:27Paul Estes:When you were saying that, one of the things I thought of was being on stage, even if you give a keynote or you're playing music, and you start seeing people pick up their phone. Like there's nothing more. Like, oh no. When you're on a stage and you're looking at the audience, you've done all this prep and you've done all this work and you've got hours behind it. And maybe one or two people in a big audience pick up their phone and you only see those one or two people. When you see that and you can translate it into business or marketing, what do you do?

8:58Vi Wickam:So when you see that is that you're looking for those disconnects. You're not just looking for the positive feedback, the positive reviews. You're looking for where are there disconnects between what we want to communicate and what people are receiving. So, you know, an example of this would be going back to reviews. If you read a review, read the one star reviews and the three star reviews, because they're going to have far more content and detail than the, hey, you guys are awesome. I love you. You know, I'll be back to buy more. That makes me feel so good. But where I learn is the, hey, you know, I ordered this thing and it hasn't shown up yet.

9:43Vi Wickam:And I called and nobody answered. What the heck, guys? you know, like you guys suck. And so you see the, the cracks in the facade, you know, that your brand promise isn't delivering and then you have things you can fix. But if you're not listening and you think, Oh, that guy's just a jerk. If you're not listening to where that's coming from, you do not take that communication. You don't grow as a brand. You don't grow as a company.

10:14Paul Estes:It feels like a lot of companies when they are listening to your point.

10:18Vi Wickam:Yeah.

10:19Paul Estes:What they give back is complicated. This week I was listening to your music because I knew I was going to talk to you and you had some Louis Armstrong on there, which was awesome. A lot of it feels complicated. So when I see a performer or listen to a performer like yourself or even see Steve Jobs, the old Steve Jobs on stage. Sure. To our earlier point behind that is thousands or hundreds of hours of work, experimentation, failure for that brief moment that I get to hear or I get to witness or see. A lot of companies are making marketing complicated. When I see their marketing, I get more confused than I get clarity.

10:58Paul Estes:In your experience, how do you make the complex simple?

11:02Vi Wickam:The first thing you got to do is get clear about your message and who you are as a company. And so at Wizard of Ads, we do what we call an uncovering. So instead of having a discovery call or something like that, we call our meeting process an uncovering, where we uncover the truth about this client or this business and who they really are down deep. What is it that drives them? What do they believe in? And who are they? What is it at their core? And when you're clear about who you are, it's a lot easier to be clear in your messaging. So the first thing is to get clear about who you are and what your message is.

11:48Vi Wickam:The second thing is to have that consistency of message across different platforms. And this is something that I often find when I come in on a new client is that they've had a disconnect between their offline media and their online messaging. because they have digital people who think that digital is different than offline. And they think that what they need on digital is to talk to computers instead of to talk to people. And the truth is, when you're doing online stuff, you have to make sure that Google can read what you put out there and that Google can understand it. But the primary focus really needs to be people because you're not selling to Google.

12:35Vi Wickam:you're selling to people.

12:38Paul Estes:You talk about transparency a lot, transparency revolution, back to that point of being honest and trying to break through in a world where everything is messy. I mean, add on the AI stuff. SEO used to be SEO and now it's SEO for AI and the list of

12:53Vi Wickam:AEO, AEO, AIO, E-I-E-I-O.

13:02Paul Estes:How do you balance the machine, the algorithms and everything that's going on with the idea to sort of uncover you or uncover and speak your truth? How do you find that balance? And not only in business, but people who are doing soul searching about their careers or their path. There's an analogy there that it's all the same.

13:23Vi Wickam:I always think that you've got to start with humans first. It's got to be people first. It's got to be clarity first. If you don't get clear about who you are and what your message is, you've got no foundation. So you've got to lay that foundation. You have to be authentic to it then consistently. So it's really easy to get off track. It's really easy to go back to the things you were doing before. so you know if you were out of sync in your communications before but we get clarity about this it's really easy to go back to what you were doing before because that was comfortable you know so spit out a whole bunch of gobbledygook you know go to chat gpt and say write me 400 blog posts that would be good for a home services company to have on their website and spit it out in a way that I can upload that to my website.

14:19Vi Wickam:And you could create a giant load of garbage that nobody will ever read that might get you some rankings. But when people land on that page, they're going to say, what is this and why? You've got to communicate to people. And, you know, when it comes to things like Google, you have to have technical SEO. So your website has to load fast, which is also great for people, you know, like slow loading websites. Nobody likes slow loading websites. And you have to like have good usability and you have to have good accessibility for people with low vision. You know, you've good contrast and proper markup language and that proper markup language will help a screen reader, but it will also help Google understand your webpage better and what the context is and why this is a headline and why this is a bulleted list or a numbered list.

15:16Vi Wickam:So ultimately, if I communicate clearly to humans and I use proper technical standards, so I'm using schema markup for things like frequently asked questions and addresses, which is talking computer to the computer, but I've still got the address and the phone number on there so that a human can see it and the phone number is clickables, So it's usable. You can do both, but you should always focus on the humans first and then make it work for Google or ChatGPT or Cloud or whoever you care about today.

15:52Paul Estes:When you think of brands that are doing it right, who kind of sticks to the top of your mind?

15:58Vi Wickam:That's a very good question because I've worked with a lot of brands who are doing these things well, but it's never easy. It's always a challenge. This is our focus at Wizard of Ads is message consistency. And it's easy to say, oh, yeah, like Nike is great at that, you know, because they really are great at that. And they have hundreds of millions of dollars annually marketing budget to spend on these things. So they better be great at it. If you're spending$10 million on an ad, you really want to make sure that ad really lands. But, you know, Apple historically has been a fantastic brand in that regard because they're clear that what they're selling is individuality and self-expression.

16:46Vi Wickam:They're not selling bits and bytes.

16:49Paul Estes:When you think of marketing in the next five years.

16:54Vi Wickam:Sure.

16:55Paul Estes:I use all the new AI tools. I'm sure you do. And Claude Cowork came out. So they have now a very specific trained model on brand. They have a trained model on sales. Like all these really fine-tuned models that you use. And you're like, I started my career as a brand marketer at Dale Computer in Texas. Dale. Dale Computer a long time ago. And I look at that and I'm like, wow, if I had that back then, it would have done everything that I did back then. When you look at the next five years, what does it mean to be a marketer?

17:36Vi Wickam:As I see it in the world of AI, brand is more important than ever. and that brand consistency and that consistency of operations from when the customer calls or uses your website or sees an ad, whether that ad is a Google ad or a YouTube video or a Facebook ad or a radio or TV ad on traditional broadcast media. Being consistent in your messaging and consistent in your customer experience is probably the most critical thing for me when it comes to marketing going forward. That consistent experience and that cohesion from awareness through hopefully becoming a brand ambassador, somebody who is a super fan of your company, that's only going to happen when who they think we are is who we actually are.