You Have Been Thinking About AI The Wrong Way - You're Missing the Big Picture

0:00All right. So we're going to talk about how you've been thinking about AI the wrong way and how you're missing the big picture. So Neil, you changed the title. Did you have something you wanted to say here before I was going to go. yeah right now most people with ai everyone we're talked to it's all about generating content and everyone's like oh generative ai you can help do images and text on demand and that's great and i know that's really useful for platforms like google and bing and even facebook and they can help you generate a lot of ad variations again this stuff is all great and there's nothing wrong with it, it's going to change marketer lives very drastically.

0:36But you as a business, I bet you're not a platform and I'm pretty strong bet. If you take all the listeners, 99.9 % of you guys aren't a platform like a Google or Facebook or anything like that. If not, almost all of you guys aren't a platform. So from your perspective, we're getting a lot of companies reaching out and be like, Hey, how can we leverage air in our marketing, like to create more content? And how can we scale faster with our images and videos and all this kind of stuff. If you actually look at content creation, how much do you think most people spend? Actually, Eric, let me ask you, do you spend a lot on content creation?

1:10Like per content piece, does it cost you a lot to write a blog article or does it cost you a lot to create a video? No, you just bust out your phone. Eric and I are doing a podcast right now. Does it cost us a lot per episode? I mean, this, no, but per video, I mean, relatively speaking, it's same as a blog post. Which is dirt cheap, right? Right? Like, do you look at AI being like, man, this is amazing. You can create a thousand articles and it's going to save me a lot of money. Do you really look at it from that perspective? Not really. You could look at a perspective. It create thousand articles.

1:42It's going to give me a lot more traffic because I could do it more efficiently. But Eric and I are both on the camp of eventually you're going to get whacked unless you have humans modifying it because the quality isn't there right now, two, three years from now, it may be a different story, but right now, Eric, I'm assuming you are still on the same page in which the quality just isn't there. If you just do AI generated content with no human being. No, you need a human being for the last mile. Exactly. So, and we've tested out a lot of it. There's a lot of people saying you can generate a lot of traffic with AI.

2:11We're not doubting that we've seen it, we've tested it, but we're also seeing the quality just be terrible. We're also doubting the longevity of it. Yes. And we've been in the game long enough where we know eventually end up getting whacked. But what Eric and I are getting at right now is the thing that people most lack. And I was speaking at an event in London called AdCon a little bit ago, a few weeks ago. And when I was speaking on stage, we were talking about AI. I asked the audience, how many of you guys log into your analytics each and every single day and make changes based on what you're seeing?

2:47Forget how many people raise their hand when I just asked them how many of you guys log in and check your analytics. But when I asked them how How many of you log in your analytics or you or your team members, someone within the company are actually making changes based on the data you're collecting? Very few people. I'm not even talking 5%. I'm talking like 2%, 3%. It was a really small percentage of the room. And this isn't just SMBs. Whether it's SMBs or large corporations, we're seeing the same thing. Very few people take action based on their analytics. They look at the stats, but it's very rare that they make changes in real time or on a daily basis or even a weekly basis.

3:24A lot of companies make changes on a monthly or quarterly basis based on their analytics, but even then they're not actually making that many changes based on the data. Where we see a huge opportunity with AI is you take all your data and you put it into one central repository, whether it's your own or Tableau or Google Studio or whatever you want to end up using. You're creating rules and you're having AI analyze your analytics and your data in real time. And you're coming up with informed decisions based on the AI helping you out. So let's say the AI tells you, hey, there's wasted spend here.

4:02You can change this and you can save X dollars or you can reallocate to this area and try to potentially get a higher ROI because this is your highest performing area. And this is your second highest performing and third and fourth. And instead of the AI just going and making a change for you, because I wouldn't trust technology, at least from a marketing standpoint, that quickly at this moment in time, but it can give you good insights. And the reason you can't just trust it to make the change, maybe you actually want to burn money because with some campaigns, you got to burn money for a week or two or a month before it produces a good ROI and you can get enough data.

4:39But imagine analyzing your analytics in real time, which is what a lot of agencies, including us are working on and giving our customers feedback, our people feedback in real time so they can make quicker decisions with the amount of money being spent on ads. It's over, you know, multiple hundred billion dollars. I think Google alone is a hundred and like 60 ish billion a year, somewhere around there. Um, I was looking at the stats the other day, ad revenue is somewhere around there, but I could be off either way. It's a well north of a hundred billion. If you combine them in Facebook, you're looking over$200 billion a year.

5:12Just think about that for a moment. If you can end up saving money in real time and come to you're spending a lot of money and then reallocate, you're going to be much more efficient as a marketing organization. That's where I see the biggest impact in AI in marketing over the next six to 12 months that people aren't talking about, especially with all this cookie list stuff that's happening. What Neil's talking about here is the way I see it is it's a, it's a subset of a higher level here. So really, you're looking at, you want AI to help you do things that you normally wouldn't do. And the question that Neil asked the audience is they're not normally looking at the data and making decisions based on it.

5:48So that's a good example of something that they normally aren't doing. And so it's not just, sure, you can enhance your workflow, it's going to decrease costs and add more efficiencies and things like that. But a lot of leverage is going to come from the things that you ultimately haven't been doing or the things that you should be doing. So that's one heuristic to think about it, one way to think about it. And the other thing is I learned this at talking to an AI expert last week, and she brought up a good point. And so there's actually three forms of AI, Neil. So one is artificial intelligence, right?

6:18And the other one is automated intelligence, and the other one is augmented intelligence. And so for the most part, for most of us right now, the stuff we're looking at, there's no artificial intelligence, because artificial intelligence can think for itself, it can talk to you, we're talking more AGI. But a lot of the stuff that we're doing right now is we're augmenting our workflows, we are automating a lot of things. And so that's why there's actually three forms of AI. So really, two things I'll leave you with is the three forms of AI. And ultimately, think about the things that you that you can actually do now with the help of AI.

6:48And, you know, Neil just gave a good example. Anything else? No, that's it. But it's don't with AI. I think the big takeaway is don't just look at what everyone else is doing, which is mainly content generation when it comes to marketing. Look for things outside the box that can really help with business efficiency and process automation. That's where you're going to get a bigger bang for the buck versus saving 10, 20, 50, a hundred bucks on creating a piece of content. Yep. That is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, read, subscribe, and we will see you later.