159 | Unleashing Google AI Studio: The Secret Sauce for Smarter Marketing with Jimmy Slagle

0:00Hello, and welcome to another live episode of the Leveraging AI podcast, the podcast that shares practical ethical ways to leverage AI, to improve efficiency, grow your business, grow your business, and advance your career. This is Isar Maitis, your host, and I have a really exciting show for you today. I will start with a really piece of exciting news for myself personally and for you as listeners to the show. We just crossed 200 ,000 downloads of this podcast. Now, when I started this podcast about a year and a half ago, I never thought that number would be possible, but here we are. So first of all, thank all of you for being loyal listeners.

0:36And if it's your first time, welcome aboard. you're joining a very large group of people that drove this number. So I'm personally very excited that we're here. To me, the number is less exciting than the importance of what we're actually doing, right? It's very obvious to everybody out there today, including recent research and surveys by the World Economic Forum that surveyed more than a few thousands of CEOs that the number one thing that is stopping AI success in companies right now is AI skills and knowledge. That's the number one reason that AI is not growing and not helping businesses grow as fast as it can.

1:09And listening to this podcast is just one way to do this for free. And while you're walking your dog, doing your dishes, driving your car, mowing the yard, whatever it is that you're doing, that you're doing this. So as I mentioned, first of all, thank you so much. I couldn't be more humbled and thankful for all of you listening to the show and driving into these crazy numbers, but it wouldn't be possible without us providing real value. And the value today happens to be talking about a specific AI tool. So there are many AI tools out there, right? There's people use ChatGPT and Gemini and Claude and MidJourney and Llama and every time there's like a new contender, a newcomer, like DeepSeek now with DeepSeek 3 and DeepSeek R1, which are amazing.

1:51And there's always new tools, but there's always these tools that are kind of like hiding in clear sight. And yet most people are ignoring them despite the fact they provide incredible value and they are free. And so one of these tools is Google AI Studio. And our guest today is an AI Studio Ninja. So Jimmy Slagle has been in the AI world longer than most of us. So he actually started in play with AI and working with companies, helping them implement AI before Chachapiti came out. So a year before Chachapiti came out, which is more than most of us can say. and he's been focused on that universe for the last three years and that's what he's been doing and one of his favorite tools that again most people don't know about or at least don't use as frequently as he does is google ai studio and he's going to share with us today on some tricks that you can do in ai studio that are extremely powerful so i'm personally very excited i love google ai studio i use it a lot so i'm sure we will geek about a few of these functionalities So I'm very excited to have Jimmy as a guest of the show.

3:00Jimmy, welcome to Leveraging AI.

3:05In the next few years, AI technology will change our world dramatically. Whether you are a business executive trying to catapult your business forward, or just somebody who refuses to be left behind and want to advance your career, this is the show for you. I'm your host Isar Maitis, a serial entrepreneur and an AI enthusiast. You'll hear invaluable practical tips from innovative business leaders, AI practitioners, and some of the brightest AI minds in our world today on how you can leverage AI in ethical ways to advance your career and grow your business.

3:46Thank you. I appreciate it, man. Yeah, I'm excited for this. And yeah, to date myself, on when I started to use AI. So I'm from Fargo, North Dakota, which is like a, you know, normally it's usually a little behind the curve in terms of technology. But I started to make a lot of content around AI in that like early 2022 era. And one of like the local news kind of journalist companies reached out and asked if I'd be willing to like talk about, you know, my five favorite AI tools. And it was so early that like ChatGPT wasn't even one of those on the list because it hadn't come out yet. So, you know, I'm sure that that list that I wrote is probably completely irrelevant today.

4:24But yeah, it's just funny that there was a list out there that wouldn't include ChatGVT of the best tools. Yeah, it was the days that everybody was still doing like the chat writers, right? It was, I'm trying to think which was the one that got the first and then they changed the name like three times after that. That was like the big like blog writing AI tool. Yeah, I know like Jasper AI. Jasper, Jasper. Yeah, but they had a different name back then. Yeah, it was Jarvis because then I think Disney came back around. There we go. So yeah, that was probably one of the items on the list. I'm sure it was.

4:57I'm sure it was. But yeah. So yeah, for all of you who are joining us live, whether you are with us live on LinkedIn or live on Zoom. So first of all, thank you. And thank you for joining us for this live session. If you have any questions, just post them in the chat. If you have anything else to add or comment, please do that. Please start by introducing yourself. Just say on LinkedIn, where are you from? What are you doing? What kind of tools do you look? Have you used Google AI Studio before? So we kind of know where you are in your journey. And before we get started, one last piece of information or update.

5:32We are launching another cohort of the AI Business Transformation course. So I've been teaching this course personally since April of 2023. So not as early as Jimmy has been in AI, but very short into the AI game. And hundreds or maybe even thousands of people have taken this course and are transforming their businesses based on the knowledge that we provide. It's four sessions, two hours each. So in a month, you can be in a completely different state of knowledge and understanding, both in means of hands-on skills on multiple use cases, as well as on clear roadmap and blueprint on how to actually implement AI successfully in your business.

6:10If that's something you're interested in doing, there's going to be a link in the show notes. We're going to drop the link right now in the live session if you're here with us live. And if you are listening off this podcast, you can use promo code LeveragingAI100 to get$100 off the price of the course. The course is filling up pretty quickly. We just literally opened it and there's already like 10 people signed up and we don't allow more than 20 people at every single cohort. So if you're interested in getting some proper AI training for 2025, and you should, come join us and act quickly. But with that, Jimmy, let's talk a little bit about Google AI Studio.

6:43And I want you to start by telling people, like, what is it? Because it's not a chatbot, right? It's like, it's something a little different. So let's explain to people, what is Google AI Studio? And then we can dive into specific use cases. Cool. Yeah. Are you cool if I share my screen and just share my screen? Yeah, absolutely. Definitely share your screen. For those of you who are listening to the podcast while you're driving, don't stop and try to look at the screen. But if you want, this will be available on our YouTube channel as well. But we will explain everything that's on the screen.

7:10So if you're just listening, you're not going to miss anything important. Awesome. Yeah. So what's interesting about Google AI Studio is this is technically for developers. It was built for developers. So people that wanted to kind of use this to then go and create their own applications that's powered by Google. This is the interface that they use. And so that's what makes it a little different than the Gemini's of the world, the ChatGPT's of the world, or the Clouds of the world. So this looks a little more intimidating than what you're used to with ChatGPT. But what I love about Google AI Studio, and what we're really going to dive into today is it is the only large language model, at least that I'm aware of, that's able to analyze an actual video file.

7:52And so what I mean by that is I can upload an actual video. And so if I take this, and this is like an ad, for example, I can use that as the data source, instead of it just being like an image or a PDF or anything along those lines, it will take a frame per second of this video. So you can now essentially use ChatGPT for any sort of video marketing or use cases that you have, which again, is pretty endless. So for example, I can say right here, like, describe this ad in extreme visual detail, and it will be able to essentially do that analysis and give you exactly what is showing up in this ad, which there's tons of use cases that we can dive into.

8:39This is a really funny if you haven't heard of the perfect gene, they're very like tongue in cheek marketing. But but but yeah, so it's it's a really just fascinating tool. And that's what first got me interested to be like, Oh, wow, I never knew that there was a there was a large language model that that could do something like this. So from the beginning, that's that's kind of what what makes it a little different from from those models, we can we can later get into some of the other cool stuff that Google is coming out with with like the real time. But for now, we'll focus just on the video analysis.

9:07Okay. So before we dive into more of the video analysis and how it can be used, like what are actual business use cases? There's a question from Gwyn, and I hope I'm pronouncing it correctly. And the question is, what is the purpose of Google AI Studio? There are many tools out there. So just want to level set as we get into this. So I will say, you mentioned one aspect that it was initially built for developers, but the reality is many of the tools that are in it right now are very much common person friendly. You don't need to write any code. You don't need to do anything. And when you open Google AI Studio and to get to it, it's just aistudio.google.com, if I remember correctly.

9:44And if you go there, there's like a menu on the side of different tools that you can pick from. So it's actually a lot more than just one tool. There's multiple things that you can do with it. The first one is more or less like a chat bot. And the biggest difference between that and just using Gemini is A, it has some additional functionality than you do before. B, you have more control on how the model actually works. So you can control the temperature, which controls how kind of like aligned with reality it is versus how will it be creative? That's the best way I can describe it. And you can control some other functionality and you're actually running it against the API, meaning you need to give them your credit card and you're running against tokens, which has pros and cons.

10:28One of the biggest pros is they always release their newest models on Google AI Studio first before it's available on Gemini. So right now, if you're running Gemini, you can get 1.5 Pro. And if you're running here, you can get Gemini 2 and Gemini 2 Flash are available to run. The biggest benefit of Gemini 2 versus 1.5 is it has an even bigger context window and you can upload out to 2 million tokens. And for those of you who don't know what that means, that's about 1.5 million words, which is by far the largest contest window you have in any tool out there. So if you have a huge amount of data that you want to run through a tool and ask questions about it, the next best one is 200 ,000 tokens on Claude.

11:14And this is 2 million. That's 10X more data that you can upload. And they're claiming 97.7 % accuracy when answering questions about the data that you upload. 97.7 % accuracy is almost as good as my wife, and it's way better than the average person. And so it's a great way, if you have a huge amount of data, that's one reason to go to this tool. What other stuff I'm interested to hear from you, Jimmy, if you have other stuff that you want to say about this and how this is different than just going to any other tool? Yeah, no, I mean, I think you hit it head on, especially the context window. I don't think we can understate how important that is For example, like one of the cool things, because I think we all know the prompts that you give these models really are what make them effective.

12:03And so for like an AI creative strategist, I mean, we have taken almost everything that we have learned. And so for those of you that are tuning in, not visually, this is if you paste it into a Google Doc, about a 75 page document, just teaching this model everything that it needs to know about creative strategy. So what the hooks are, what the best ad concepts are, and just everything else to make sure that it knows exactly the language and best use cases and practices in this space. And so that's what makes this a just very, very powerful model. So again, to explain to people, this is a 75 page prompt.

12:41Yeah. If you load this to any other tool, you already taken either all or a big chunk of the context window that is usable in a single chat. And here it's a drop in the bucket because there's 2 million tokens and you've just taken, let's say 50 ,000. It's still 50 ,000 out of 2 million versus 50 ,000 out of 125 ,000 if you're running ChatGPT as an example. And so it's a huge, huge benefit. And as I mentioned, the other thing is, if you're doing research on variety of data and you're loading multiple data from multiple sources, and I've uploaded Excel files with over a million rows into this, which will not open in most tools that I know, and you can still ask questions about it and get accurate information.

13:25So it's very, very powerful from that perspective. Let's jump back to the video analysis, right? So there are tools out there that can give me a summary of a video, but that's very different, right? So let's explain how it's that different. And if you give examples of what use cases can be used for, that would be very helpful. Yeah, for sure. So right now, what you technically can do from a video is just get the transcripts. They're outside of Google AI Studio. There's no way to be able to actually get the visuals that are happening within that video. And so when you can get summaries from videos, normally that's just looking at the transcript if it's on YouTube or anywhere else and just telling you, hey, here's everything that happens.

14:03But when you get into the world of marketing, whether that's creating organic content or creating ads, you need an AI model that's able to actually see what's happening in the video to be able to be your co-creator, if you will. You know, I like to I like to give people the example all the time. If I showed you, let's just say it's, you know, a video on TikTok, and you had to close your eyes and just hear what's happening and and, you know, essentially get the script of it. You can only give so much feedback on on how to make that video better. But if you just open your eyes, and you can see everything and hear everything, it makes it, you know, 10 times more powerful.

14:41And so so that's where this tool really comes in is for marketers that if you're creating any sort of video content, you now just have this model that deeply understands what's happening and can give feedback to how to make that content better. And obviously, we've been pretty high level, but I'm more than happy to dive into a lot of different examples of the specific business use cases that you can use to fully get the most out of this tool. Yeah. So again, the bottom line is it is the only tool that I know of, and again, you too, that can actually see the video, like the visuals of what's happening.

15:17So if you are either trying to analyze why some video is working and becoming viral, if you have 10 of them, so take 10 videos that went viral on whatever platform, it doesn't matter whether it's LinkedIn or TikTok or Instagram or wherever and say, okay, analyze why these went viral and it can give you cues on what's happening beyond what was said in the transcript, but actually the structure of the video, the visuals of the video, the colors of the video, the text in it, like all of these things, this is the only tool, period, that can do this right now. So let's really look into a few use cases, how you've used this in an effective way for business solutions.

15:54Cool. Yeah. So right away, like, let's just say that, you know, like I like to make content on social media and a big part of making effective content is honestly coming down to, you know, essentially trying to get people to watch a video for as long as possible. The algorithm is going to reward that. So you can take a video that you created and like a very simple prompt. And I mean, in this case, there's no system instructions. If I were to like truly use this, I'd probably add a lot more to help it know. But nonetheless, like a simple example is analyze this video and identify the main viewer drop off points.

16:24Give me specific timestamps and suggest three changes to improve retention. So again, it will analyze that video. It looks at, okay, maybe these are the areas where people are going to drop off and then gives you suggestions on how to make that video or that potential drop off point more engaging. And so I think this is a great way to just again, have a second set of eyes look at the video that's completely unbiased to tell you, this is where it's probably going to start to lose lose that attention. So this is one of the use cases that I love another one. So this was very similar, like, again, describe the hook of this video in extreme detail, is it strong enough to stop the scroll, you know, beyond just retention, like the hook, the first three seconds has to be effective.

17:05And so this is going to dive into the hook evaluation, it will then look at the strength of the hook. And, and you know, it will tell you if it thinks it does have a good chance of getting people to stop scrolling and actually watch. Another really cool one that was just mentioned is you can upload multiple video files. So it's not just one. So let's just say you have, you have four or five ads, and you want to compare the messaging and ask like, which one is most clear and compelling for your audience and why. So it will then again, analyze all the different videos, the four that you uploaded.

17:34And I think, you know, sometimes it does bug out, like, like, this is this is very much so a model where if you give it too much data, there will be some like internal errors that can happen. So I like to kind of keep it at maybe a couple minutes for video content. But in theory, I think you're able to upload videos that are an hour long. I haven't tried to do something that long. I did not know that. And I've never tried something that long either. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that that might that might be a little tough work. But short form, you know, vertical videos, ads, any of that stuff. You know, I usually like to do like five to six to just ask about this, this analysis, and it will give you give you the rundown of let's analyze the ads, it will go through and do that.

18:10And then it'll give you the recommendation. So it thinks the fourth ad is the clearest uses direct concise language bullet points. And and yeah, the negative opening approach creates intrigue. So it's like good at being able to analyze these patterns of what what is effective messaging. The other thing to even outside of, you know, any trend analysis is you can just use it for quality control. Let's say you're making videos and you use an editor or you use a designer or whatever, you can have this be the proofreader. So instead of you having to go and make sure all the captions are correct and there's no grammar errors or anything, you just throw it in here, ask it to proofread the ad for any typos, grammar errors, inconsistencies in tone, any of that, and you can have it just provide those specific corrections.

18:51So four quick examples. Don't worry, there's many more that we can go down, but just to get people's creative juices flowing. No, this is absolutely brilliant. I want to connect some of the dots that we said, because I think there's a broader flow that I'm sure you're doing based on your 75-page prompt. So let's say you don't know how to create ads at all, and you created a few videos and you posted them wherever you want to post them, doesn't matter where, and you get crickets. You're like, well, I'm trying to do this the best that I can. I'm trying to see what other people are saying. I took a course on YouTube.

19:21I followed some people's guidance. Nothing is happening. How can I make this better? Well, now you have a video production consultant for almost free. And I'm going to touch on the numbers in a second because there's a question on LinkedIn, but almost free. And you can take multiple videos that are successful, that you're seeing that are getting a lot of engagement, upload them together and give it a prompt saying, hey, you're an expert in analyzing video content on this and that platform. I want you to compare these, to compare these all together and figure out why they're working. what could be the reasons and create a best practices prompt on what should be the best way to create a video that can be viral and go blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

20:01And then it will create it for you. And then you can use that as a filter for your next production, right? So now you have best practices that was created based on actual success in your niche, in your platform to your target audience. So everything is aligned with what you need to create on your own. And then you can upload your video and say, okay, now analyze it based on this. And it's going to tell you what you probably need to change as far as, okay, you need a stronger hook. You need a faster transition from this to that. You need more variation on the screen because people get bored after 1.5 seconds because we created Madness in this day era that people are like, oh, it's the same thing for the five seconds.

20:42Like it's so boring. And, and, you know, so pattern variation and stuff like that, but it's going to tell you all these things and it's going to help you create better and better videos that can be aligned to the other videos that are more successful from aspects you can't even think about, right? So it will give you a lot of stuff. So really, really great stuff. There was a question on LinkedIn from Stan on, is there a way to estimate the cost of running the queries? So yeah, so all these tools, again, run, this particular tool runs on tokens. These are tokens from depending on which model you pick, but in general, they're very cheap.

21:16So as an example, Gemini 1.5 flash costs$0.0375. So 3.75 cents for every million tokens of input. So whatever you're writing in the videos you're uploading and 15 cents for every million tokens coming out. So that gives you an idea. Obviously, two will be a little more expensive, but probably not by a lot. So it's completely negligible based on the value that you're going to get from that. So you can probably run a whole week of this thing for$5 or probably less. And so it's really, really cheap. And yet it's different than using Gemini because it is pay per usage versus pay per month kind of thing.

22:02Any other things you want to mention specifically about the video capability, or you want to move and talk a little bit about the streamlined real-time capabilities? Yeah, the only other thing I'd say is like I put together a database of a lot of prompts that you can use. This is more maybe more tied towards advertising, but nonetheless, like you could easily replicate a lot of these prompts for organic social going viral and all that. So I don't know what the best way would be to share this with with the people that were here, but I'm more than happy to give this out. So so people have a good kind of prompt library that they can that they can start with and use to just Yeah, that is awesome.

22:39Just put it in the chat. I'll move it to the other chat as well. And because I'll have the link in the chat, I will post it in the show notes as well. So those of you listening after the fact, first of all, what the hell are you doing listening after the fact? We do this every Thursday at noon. You can come in, you can ask your questions, and you can get the information sooner. But if you are not available to join us on Thursday noon every week, then it will be in the show notes and you can get to this thing. So thank you. Thank you for sharing that. I would say too that the one other thing that I think is worth showing about Google AI Studio is because it's the developer platform, you can start to do some pretty cool things with within the automation and workflows element.

23:16So in this case, let's just say that you wanted to get a summary of the ads that the Ridge if you haven't heard of them, it's like a slim fitting wallet, you know, something like that. And so you could create an automation. This is a tool called Gumloop. It's a no code automation workflow builder. And just like quickly, like all you have to do if you build one of these out is upload a URL, you would have an agent scrape to find the Facebook ad library account, it can then within Facebook, you can select video. And it can then analyze in this case, I just said like the 10, like 10 ads to analyze, and then you can create a prompt on what exactly you want to look for within those video files for a company like that.

23:58And then you can get a whole breakdown of that without having to do a single thing into a Google Doc or Notion or wherever you want this to be. And this is a, you know, 22 page document that breaks down all of the, you know, 10 ads that this company had used. So there's going to be a lot of cool use cases that will make it easier for people to be able to do cool things and kind of plug and play into different tools or data points. But this is at least one other thing to start to see like, oh, this is going to move really quick from you just needing to have a one-shot prompt to full-fledged like AI workflows.

24:31Yeah. And again, just not to confuse people, that was not Google AI Studio. That's a different tool, but it's just showing some of the capabilities that AI is becoming more and more capable as far as stringing things together in multiple steps in a tool that can bring together different things, including videos and scraping and analysis and so on and stuff like that. There's a question from Danielle. Is the feature of any Gemini account or only paid accounts? So Google AI Studio is not connected to Gemini or your account. Literally, all you have to do is sign up and give them your credit card so you can use tokens on the API.