Ep 589: 70% Different or Meta Buckets It: The Andromeda Creative Playbook (w/ Braydon Germain, Pilothouse)

0:00Braydon Germain:One thing I learned during Black Friday is you don't want to put out something that's like really obvious AI. I think that doesn't really help your brand and I think a lot of brands are sensitive to that as well. And so I kind of had to find a strategy that A, wasn't time consuming. Like if I'm spending eight hours just prompting trying to get the perfect video, it's a bit of a waste of time for me. So I really found ways to leverage these AI tools quickly and kind of let them flow under the radar of people being like, oh, is this real or is this fake? And so some of the stuff I was doing was...

0:33ChatGPT tips so it isn't such a people pleaser. How you, you know, talk to your ChatGPT so it gaslights you less.

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1:16Braydon Germain:Get the feels at contentful.com. It's all killer, no filler. I'm Eric Dick on the D2C podcast, And we have returning guest, Brayden Germain, who is sort of a resident expert with all things AI here on the Pilothouse team. I just feel like there's some absolute insane AI energy happening right now. D2C, we're now SaaS developers. There's all sorts of things happening. What's going on with AI in your world, Brayden? I mean, there's a lot. There's a lot of creative stuff that's happening, especially in the age of Andromeda. I think some of these static creation AI tools are getting really good. that's definitely going on the video stuff is also super interesting and just getting better and better oh my god and uh you know amazing to see i think a lot of these like uh after effects nerds who just didn't have the raw materials to make cool videos but now they can just you know prompt and get this like raw material and then mix it all together with with after effects it's it's pretty inspiring pretty cool to kick things off let's talk about the claw bot situation Okay, yeah, for sure.

2:20I read an interesting tweet, and I want to parse some of the information I've heard. What's your take on the implication of this for our industry, I guess? What is it, first of all?

2:30Braydon Germain:You can think of it as an autonomous AI that works continuously on a computer. So it's not so much that it's a chat interface or anything like that. You can talk to it through things like Typeform or Slack, and that's how you communicate with it. But it will run on your machine. And so I don't know if a lot of people have heard of this, but there's like Mac minis are sold out because people are buying these Mac minis, setting up MaltBot on their Mac mini and running it on there. It's an open source platform. And it's pretty crazy. Like effectively, people are trying to, you know, make it into an employee.

3:04Braydon Germain:And I've seen some insane tutorials where, you know, answering emails, doing tasks on the computer. Stock trading. Yeah. And, you know, connecting to Zapier and people are trying to figure out how to make it safe. I think that's like the one big thing is if you just give it access to your computer, like it can open up Chrome, it can go into your Google, it can like do anything you want, really. So there's a lot of safety concerns, I think. But it's effectively getting closer and closer to driving a computer. And if an AI can drive a computer, it's effectively what a lot of us, you know, as marketers do is we sit on our laptops and we drive our computers.

3:40Braydon Germain:So it's getting close. Is it powered by Claude or is it, is it, is Claude underneath it or is that something else? Yeah. So it's, it's Clawbot, which is like, I think their logo is like a lobster. And then Claude got kind of, you know, miffed about that. And so Claudebot was changed to Maltbot. Okay. And so you can use Anthropic and you can use Claude as its large language model, but you can also connect ChatGPT, you can connect Gemini through APIs. And I, and I think really the ideal is that you would have a open source LLM that's not connected to any of these large ones. So you could effectively put like a, like an LLM on your Mac that just lives as it's like servers on the Mac.

4:26Braydon Germain:And so everything is kind of contained self-contained there. I was following the social network, the MaltBot, ClawBot social network drama. And then I saw, I saw a really interesting tweet that followed that because to catch people up was essentially this idea that someone created a social network for these bots and they started talking and conspiring and they created a religion called crustafarianism or something like that. But then I saw a tweet just yesterday. I was trying to find it so I could reference it. But it was a guy who was taking credit for having written the crustafarian tweet, posing as a bot, being a human, posing as a bot.

4:59And he said that almost all the posts that were referenced as like scary things that AIs were doing were actually friends of his that he knew were human, which I thought it was really interesting because there's all these stories picked up and they told the story of these creepy bots doing these things, but all the examples they use were actually the human insights that were being generated. And so it sort of had me go full circle to be like, oh good, there still is the power of human creativity is still something that humans recognize and gravitate towards. Yeah.

5:30Braydon Germain:Yeah. I think that was a scary moment, but if you think about, you know, we all work in DTC And we're all trying to get likes, impressions and clicks and stuff. And I think like you could go and instruct one of these club bots to give the perception that it's coming up with its own language or, you know, that sort of stuff, you know, coming up with religion. But I think most of the time it's probably human driven in order to, you know, get lots of attention on Twitter and X and stuff like that. You have a note here to jump right into some of the Black Friday AI winners. I know it's a little post Black Friday, but I'm really interested to hear about the way AI was really successfully used.

6:08I assume that's for creatives during Black Friday.

6:11Braydon Germain:Yeah, I think like when AI video and AI images came out, I think we had a lot of clients that were excited about it and just kind of thought, hey, now we can do insane volume. Like, just go for it. And I think one thing I learned during Black Friday is you don't want to put out something that's like really obvious AI. I think that doesn't really help your brand. And I think a lot of brands are sensitive to that as well. And so I kind of had to find a strategy that A, wasn't time consuming, because if you're like spending with my job, like if I'm spending eight hours just prompting trying to get the perfect video, it's a bit of a waste of time for me.

6:47Braydon Germain:So I really found ways to leverage these AI tools quickly and kind of let them flow under the radar of people being like, oh, is this real or is this fake. And so some of the stuff I was doing was, you know, really involved with Photoshop using Nano Bonanno and taking like screenshots of influencers, taking existing content, and then kind of repurposing it in like interesting ways. For example, we have a brand that has an eye mask. And one of them was like, let's put her on top of the moon. Let's put her in Everest, like let's on top Everest. Let's like have one of them of her standing with a sign that says Black Friday.

7:22Braydon Germain:And She's like outside of an airplane window, just like it doesn't look AI, but it definitely stops the scroll. And so that was a lot of the processes that I did. And they were like quick, was able to come up with lots of ideas, maybe create different age people. So say we're going after like an older persona, we could kind of get that like 50, 60 year old model that are kind of hard to source in the DTC world. And then the other thing was just trying to think outside of the box. And I think the cool thing with a lot of these video tools is that you can put the first frame and the last frame in.

7:54Braydon Germain:And so then I was able to kind of AI generate very organic looking content using existing content as kind of like the reference. So I'd get those statics and then I'd put them in. So one of them was the product was on like an airplane tray table and it started there. And then that was the first shot. And then the last shot was like the girl holding the sign up outside the airplane window. And so you kind of had this like POV shot of like the product and then like it looked out the window and you could see this like girl like holding a sign on the airplane wing. And that one was actually one of the better ones that we did.

8:25Braydon Germain:And it kind of flew under the radar. Probably people were like, is this AI? Does this feel real? So it was kind of making it feel real, but also not wasting a ton of time trying to create that stuff. Because you can literally do anything. That's the challenge that you find yourself in, whether it's creative or building, you know, new SaaS tools. Almost anything is possible. It's pretty wild. Talk to me about some of these static ad creation AIs that you used and to good effect. Right now, all of our ads for both the agency, like our agency community, as well as D2C are all AI statics that we're hitting some really good numbers in terms of our CPAs at this point.

9:03What tools are you using in the static world?

9:05Braydon Germain:I've never really been too thrilled with like how AI tools have worked. Maybe like six months ago, you know, I would have said, you know, the stuff isn't there yet but i've been recently using a tool where you can plug in all of your brand's information on the back end like their fonts their logos all the color palette you know you basically create this like brand guidelines for them and then you chat with it like chat gpt and you can access ad library and you can go and click on you know different ad inspirations and say like i want it to be like this brand's ad but you know for this product you can select different products on your website.

9:42Braydon Germain:And it does an amazing job. Like, you know, I was able to pump out, I timed myself in two and a half hours, I did nine static ads and no issues with the small fonts, you know, of the product, no issues with that sort of thing. It really nailed it. And, you know, to create nine static ads would have been a lot more time consuming to do the traditional way. So it's coming a long way. The tool is not perfect, but it's definitely on its way. Now, you mentioned the age of Andromeda. So go one level deeper with those nine creatives, because in the past, you might have created two angles and three variations for each of those angles.

10:19But when you say nine static creatives, are you talking about like nine sort of like fleshed out, like full concepts, right? Talk a little bit about how you think about concepting.

10:28Braydon Germain:Yeah, so Andromeda is different. Before we used to be able to do micro iterations where we would say, hey, we've got this winner, let's change the color of the CTA, let's maybe change the product image, let's change the headline. And so we could effectively get more volume from our designers by saying like, hey, I need five iterations of this, subtle tweaks, and we could throw that in and maybe one of those would hit and we'd get a little bit better of a CTR or we would get a better ROAS. but now in the age of Andromeda, Andromeda and Meta's new AI is going to bucket those if they're too close.

11:04Braydon Germain:So I think like the general rule of thumb is like unless it's 70 % different, it's going to bucket it into one creative. So you could put five iterations that look fairly similar and Meta will only see it as one. And so what you really need to be doing is just coming up with these new concepts and that's time consuming from like a content briefing standpoint, but also from a designer standpoint and then also from a revision standpoint because now you've got five new concepts that like need the client to give revisions or give feedback on so it's really forcing I think a change in the way that we think about how to deliver creative and tools like this I think are inevitable so that we can get the volume we can get the contrasting concepts.

11:52Braydon Germain:And then hopefully, like, because we're able to just kind of pump this stuff out, hopefully we can just speed up the process and then give Andromeda what it wants, which is just like a plethora of different ad creative ideas. So the way that I do it is, is we come up with a, like a strategic overview of what we're really trying to do, like, like, what's the angle. And then from there, I will kind of see how many different ways I can expand on that angle with different creative. I like your point you have next here about chat GPT tips. So it isn't such a people pleaser. Like I've never felt more gaslit than by my chat GPT.

12:25I just started using Claude and feel like maybe it's a little better, but I'm curious about how you, you know, talk to your chat GPT. So it gaslights you less.

12:34Braydon Germain:You can go into the settings and you can give it custom instructions. And basically what I told it, I said, you are my mentor and I need you to pressure test all my ideas. And I need you to call me out when they're bad ideas and tell me why their bad ideas so that we can get everything solid and bulletproof. And just by doing that, it takes a different tone. You know, it's not like, of course, Brayden, or like, oh, I see, you know, it's just like hardcore mentor mode. Like, here's where you're going wrong. It's like the first thing it responds with, and then it breaks it down. And I think that's just like a way that I've found to improve its, yeah, to improve its outputs, just really saying like, you're a mentor and like the, my, my success is based on what level of critical thinking you have.

13:19Braydon Germain:So that's one way that I've, I've done it. And it's, and it's been really helpful. I love that you are Yoda. I am, but a Padawan. The next point you have here is the future of AI. And I'll just use this as an opportunity to talk about our week here on the DDC side, which has just been absolutely wild. I just had a little memory come up of three years ago when I was using either chat GPT or, or one of the other ones to create some images for this publication we were creating. And it was all creating these really great cinematic images. And sometimes the fingers were messed up. And, and I was comparing that to like, what was happening this week, which was my co founder on DSC started looking at our onboarding flow, which we're radically changing, started looking at how content works in our newsletter and how we could make our newsletter, you know, more appealing to more people.

14:05So he ended up using Claude creating a hall of 10 avatars who would rate everything on our newsletter and give us all this feedback, which then morphed into him to actually using Claude Cowork and the Claude Code to start building out HTML code for the newsletter, which then led into him building a full content delivery system for the newsletter that allows us to both write real content, generate other content, this whole perfectly tuned SaaS product where he's built logins for us all. And he's not a developer by any stretch. And in two days, he's built an entire sort of like newsletter system that could only be built for us with this, all these feature sets that he doesn't even know he needed.

14:50And it's just like, it's insane what is possible with these products.

14:55Braydon Germain:And yeah, it's like you said, you just have to have the imagination and be willing to put in the time to kind of uncover what's possible. And these tools are, are, are here for it. They are down to help us do whatever we need to do. And that's pretty insane. So he just did that in two days? Yes, in two days. And you feel like it's like functioning? Yeah, we're going to send out Friday's newsletter. If you're not subscribed to the newsletter, maybe subscribe on Friday because you might receive the first ever AI HTML newsletter from us. But yeah, we just were on a one and a half hour long meeting this morning where we were like fine tuning and tweaking it.

15:30And we're going to send the first one generated this way. And again, all the content is still written by human. for now, but we have it like helping us frame it in a way that's better based on these 10 avatars that we created. We're also going to then create, we have already created on ChatGBT last week, like a DTC podcast brain. So it's got all of DTC podcasts in it. So we write a newsletter and we're like, hey, come up with examples from the podcast for each of the things that we talk about. And then it pulls from all of the different podcasts we have. So we got to port that over to Claude. We just had a tech meeting where we're going to port these giant brains over to Claude.

16:06And then it's like this comprehensive system of building our newsletter, referencing past newsletters, referencing podcasts. We're going to eventually put in performance data from each of the newsletters or each of the podcasts. So Claude now knows where, which newsletters are performing better, which content performs better. All the only thing that I'm thinking during all this is it's like, you can literally do anything now. And I'm like, should I be like the things that people will be using AI to build are going to be absolutely insane. Like we're building a newsletter for D2C founders. Why don't I ask it to figure out a newsletter that would pay me 10 times as much, you know, and figure out how to execute that?

16:42Cause I probably could at this point. It is wild.

16:44Braydon Germain:And it just makes me think that like you would never hire an employee to do all that work of indexing the transcripts and reading through the transcripts and searching through that. You couldn't hire an employee to do that. And now I think that's sort of the tasks that are like, it's really excelling at at this point is just these, you could never hire enough people to do that. It's just not cost effective. And now you have this person, this like brain that effectively can, you know, really steer an organization or steer at least your life. So yeah, it's awesome. What a time to be alive. What else were you going to offer about your thoughts on the future of AI?

17:19Braydon Germain:I think there's a lot of doom and gloom out there. And I think, you know, part of me really thinks we should be optimistic about it. And so I just think I would encourage everybody, you know, as the future comes quicker and quicker, just get your hands on some tools. I've spent some time, you know, on some AI boot camps and just learning the stuff myself just to get, you know, better at the tools. And then if a piece of software, like, comes out with an AI integration, like just making sure that you're using that stuff and seeing ways to leverage it, I think is just important in the future. And I wouldn't be afraid of it.

18:00Braydon Germain:I think I would just embrace it. And I think the future is going to be pretty cool. And obviously, if they create an AI that can drive a computer better than I can, obviously, that's going to be a little scary. But I think if you just stay on top of it, you'll just be able to be a controller of AI and just create more value. I am a techno optimist generally as well. and I think you're absolutely right. And yeah, seeing what is possible is just so eye-opening. I'm trying to figure out when this podcast will come out but next week on Monday, we have a podcast from New York & Co. The CMO there, Laura Cantor and a lot of the podcast is actually about a post she made on LinkedIn that went crazy viral getting millions and millions of views and literally the post was about how she switched her site from hydrogen to liquid.

18:49They went off headless onto like a pretty standard Shopify build for this huge e-commerce site a week before Black Friday. And how she ended up using this tool that's called Zenit, Z-E-N-Y-T dot A-I, it kind of does what Jeff kind of built for our newsletter, where it scans your website as a customer or as different kinds of customers would view your website and gives you like 500 suggestions about whether it's like you have a lot of a big product catalog and your images don't match up. Maybe you used a lot of AI images and there's some problems there or whatever. But the point of her post was in this age of AI, it's super important that we also keep connected to our community because people are constantly solving these problems in different ways that you didn't even know your website has maybe.

19:32But this post just resonated and got like 2 million views or something like that, sold dozens or hundreds of these Zenit subscriptions. but again every person that hears that could go and fix their website which again is a job that you couldn't hire a mechanical Turk or a hundred mechanical Turks to do but now it's possible. Yeah and so so I guess what you're saying is staying connected to a community and being

19:56Braydon Germain:exposed to all these ideas that are happening around us because if you kind of shelter yourself out from being on x and and or being a part of these like AI communities then you really don't know what's around the corner, or you don't know if there's like a solution that actually could help your business. That's just like a few clicks, like you're saying, two days away to transforming your business. Embrace the FOMO. There was one other thing you had on here, and we do have a little time, so let's shout it out. I know we as a shop use motion.app, or a lot of the team members do. What are some of the new AI features that are moving the needle for that platform?

20:29Braydon Germain:I just think like creative strategy is so important in the age of Andromeda. and some of these new AI features that Motion has been rolling out are so impressive. You know, they've got this AI tagging feature that will, you know, it'll actually look at your ads. It'll read the transcripts. I think it even looks at the video, like it'll snapshot the videos. And so it gets context of what your ads are doing and it will tag your ads. And then you can go into like different patterns and you can see like, okay, this is like our intended audiences. This is who we're going after. These are the formats that have been working.