AI’s Real Role in Marketing

0:08Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantz And my guest today is Andy Crestadina. He's a recognized authority in digital marketing, co-founder and chief marketing officer of Orbit Media Studios and an influential voice on content strategy, SEO and website optimization. With two decades of hands-on experience, Andy is known for breaking down complex marketing tactics into practical, actionable steps. My kind of guy. And he's a sought after speaker and the author of Content Chemistry and a regular contributor to leading industry publications. So, Andy, welcome to the show.

0:45Thanks for having me, John. Glad to hear. We have known each other, about each other, whatever the definition is, for many years. And I just discovered this the first time you've been on my show. So why don't you come back like weekly? I would never say no. I'd hang out with you all day, John, if I could. Let's jump into AI. I mean, what the heck? What are we, 41 seconds in? Where do you see it making the biggest real-world impact for marketers today? I know that's a pretty big question. I think about it a lot. I think that probably the future of marketing is lowering risk and cost by building synthetic members of a target audience and then testing content, pages, calls to action, strategies with that AI persona.

1:30Uh, so Sims, like running a little, like, like making a thing and getting feedback on it before you put it in the market. Because I think it's likely, it seems to me that we'll look back at this era and say, wow, it's super primitive. You used to just make a thing and make it live and hope for the best and check it later. Probably not in the future. We'll do it in a bit more sophisticated way. You know, I hadn't really thought about that idea because I think so many people are focused on automations and efficiencies and getting rid of people. I mean, you're obviously, I mean, I'm really of the camp that it's going to change some things around in terms of people.

2:05But I think it also is, you know, they're already seeing it creating some demand in some areas for people that didn't exist before. So is the concern that, was it Sam Altman that said? Yeah. Like 95 % of marketing or white collar jobs will be gone in five years? Yeah, I think there's, I'm going to stay out of the prediction game and wondering, but I'll tell you what I'm here for and have been from the beginning and you too. It's, I don't, I don't wake up in the morning hoping to save 10 minutes or half an hour. I want to do great work. I want to see the performance of that work. I want to know that I'm doing quality work.

2:45I want to see the feedback and the performance of everything in the data. So really, everything I've ever done with AI, and this is hundreds of experiments, it's, you know, half my day on Saturday was building a custom GPT and testing it. But everything that I've done has really just been about trying to improve quality. And if it turns out to be faster, that's lovely. But what we're all trying to do is to drive an outcome. So I think a lot of marketers are overemphasizing efficiency and speed and missing big opportunities to use it to push performance. Yeah. And one of the, ironically, one of the, I think one of the enemies of quality is that we got so much on our plate, right?

3:29And I think that even quality relationships, I mean, I'm finding that if there's a lot of stuff that had to be done, but let's face it, it was grunt work, you know, that had to be done. And I do think that some people are feeling like, hey, if I get that off my plate, it kind of frees my head up. You know, even like I say, for more relationship building. And I think that's, you know, where quality is going to come from, isn't it? Absolutely. So it will give you a free hand to work harder on those, you know, the conversations you're having, prioritizing offline experiences, being part of communities, you know, just taking care of the people around you.

4:06But the one thing that I've been doing with a lot, and this was, you know, my very last call, talking to a client, looking for opportunities to make these pages better stronger, faster, more detailed and comprehensive. It's for a higher ed program. And we just gave ChatGPT the persona and gave it the page and said, we're looking to make this a more comprehensive page, give us ideas. The very first idea was fantastic. It's like, which program is right for you? What? Wait, how? And the meeting sort of paused, like everyone kind of held their breath for a second and asked, like, did we not do that?

4:40Wait, we didn't do that. Why didn't we do that? And there were several others, like three or four things. Yeah, so AI-powered gap analysis is one of my favorite things, but they're always best discovered through relationships and real-world human conversation. So a lot of Orbit Media's work is or has been design or at least design is an element of it. How do you feel about the design creative process right now? I think there's a lot of people trying to create tools that can automate a lot of things in that space. there's some really awful stuff coming out through that. I mean, how do you feel about that space right now, where it is today and where you see it going?

5:19Well, design for interactive, there's a kind of a turning point happening now because these tools like Figma, where you're designing it somehow in a context where it's already responsive and the front end programming for things that, you know, web teams are building is sort of half done. Now, kind of like writing or, you know, image generation, the code generated by AI still requires a lot of like review. No one's just grabbing it and assuming it's all perfect. It's not. So there's a big gain there in the handoff between designers and programmers, but not, you know, there's still plenty of work to do.

5:56The other one I think is in design. What do you hire? What do you get when you hire a web company? Partly you're, you want service. You want someone to listen to you. You want accountability. you want a thought partner, and you want pixel perfection. I don't think AI is there. I don't think that if you, brands big and small, want to work with designers to get the thing to look just like they want it to look. The state of AI for UX, it all feels like these long shot prompts. It's just like, oh, something good comes back. And you can't really ask it to fine tune, just creating another one each time.

6:33I don't know. So design for simple things, design direction, great, but not for pixel perfection. I'm going to question how much of the market actually wants or understands pixel perfection. I mean, isn't there a significant amount of the market that's like, well, that's good enough? I'm sure there is. It's not mostly our audience. I had a 40-minute call with a client about how you know this circle like brand is everything and the edge of the circle needs to be a little bit closer to the edge of the box on both mobile and desktop like there are still lots of people who are who want their fingerprints on their design i understand that i don't think that visitors care that much about the number of pixels between the circle and the edge of the box But so, yeah, if you're looking for good enough or a great start or here's the giant step in a good direction, it's awesome.

7:30But people really do like service. And there is a special thing that happens, like you said, about relationships, you know, when creative teams work together to solve problems with clients and leaders. Yeah, I mean, I personally, and again, I wouldn't put myself out there as being, you know, on the front line of image creation or whatnot with some of the tools. But some of the stuff I've done with it, I mean, every now and then it's like, yeah, that's okay. And then every now and then it's just like, that's like that person has no face. How can I use that? It's changing fast. It's changing fast.

8:02Image generation. I sort of wish I could go back and I would have put in the same prompt every month just to sort of see the evolution of it because it's improving quickly. Yeah. But yeah, don't look too closely at hands. Text is still a problem. It's getting much, much better. But, you know, halfway through here at 2025, there are long shot prompts, let's be honest. Speaking of maybe that's good enough, let's talk about content creation. I think a lot of people, that was probably the first use case for many people is, oh, look, this can write this blog post for me. I think a lot of people are starting to find out that's just not going to cut it.

8:35In fact, I won't go as far as saying the old Google penalty thing, but I think that they're being penalized in the eyes of everything that's reading the content today. I don't see a reason to write an article, to publish an article if AI can create it. Yeah. Because your target audience can write that same prompt and get that same article. That's, in fact, the last thing you should publish. So for the duct tape marketing audience and fans of yours and people who read my stuff, I think it should be obvious that the difference between AI generated just garbage and quickly made stuff and medium quality or the boring taste-like-water articles, and strong points of view, original research, deep content, like taking a stand, collaborative formats like we're doing now.

9:26Stuff is going to be even more different in the future. I think that content strategy is going to have a great moment here as the tide goes out and all these marketers just look like it becomes really clear. No one's ever going to read that again. And, you know, whoever's byland that was just lost reputation. So, yeah, strong opinion, original research, collaborative formats, highly visual content. These will feel more different than ever. So, you know, it's like influencers and video. These things will be, I think, more effective in the future than even they are today. So as I listen to you to describe that, you know, the old game used to be, I mean, content and SEO or search visibility.

10:10Certainly we're very married together. And as I listen to you describe that, I mean, it really, I mean, is keyword ranking just not really a thing anymore? It's not important anymore. Thank you for asking that. I'm seeing so much about this and I'm really excited to give this answer. Everyone needs to separate in their minds these two types of key phrases. People looking for answers are looking for articles. AI overviews will kind of give that person the answer. Click through rates to content marketing for search optimized articles will decline forever. It has been for five years anyway. But commercial intent keyphrases, what the buyer searches for.

10:48Visit website intent keyphrases. There's still tons of them. Separate it in your analytics, blog posts from your sales pages, and then check the changes to traffic. And then check the changes to rankings and click-through rates and engagement. Because people who are making big decisions want to look at a website. They're going to click through no matter what Google puts in their way. I think one of the pieces of that puzzle is that they're still getting, in many cases, even this long, drawn out, long tail phrase is still being provided in increasingly AI overviews. And so the game then becomes like, OK, I've already filtered.

11:24I'm not going to go look 10 places. I'm going to maybe pick one or two of these. So the game then becomes showing up in those AI overviews or whatever that looks like. Is there a different approach to that? for sure again perfect question john i love this conversation it there's more to content than search these posts i don't have time to respond to them all i'm not in it to like start a food fight but content marketing is dead because of seo that was your only channel is that all you ever thought it was about yeah so this is my number one b2b marketing strategy for content today is of course the linkedin newsletter it was okay i've been doing it like now for like five years but the The visibility of my content is literally 10 times what it ever was before.

12:07How's that possible? Because I decided it was a sensible time to build on rented land. Because I saw the changes coming and adapted my strategy. Because I'm now partnering with big tech. Google is not in business to help SEOs. But LinkedIn is in business to help content creators and publishers grow an audience on their platform. So no, our typical articles now literally get 10 times the visibility that they ever got before, even though click-through rates from search are down and declining. And it doesn't bother me a bit. Yeah, of course, anyone who's not familiar with your work, I will say that part of, I think part of the reason, of course, consistency that you've provided.

12:48But also, I mean, your articles go in, I mean, they're basically masterclasses. And so I think that certainly has something to do with the reason that you're getting so much exposure is it's just terribly valuable. That means so much to me coming from you. Thank you, John. But hopefully then that reinforces the point about writing things by hand. I mean, I include contributor quotes in every article. There's almost no scroll depth at any article in which you can't see something like a visual or screenshot or video. I do lots of original research. They're carefully constructed, like very structured pieces with bullet lists and subheads and internal linking.

13:26And I've learned from people like you, like going way back to like, just be super direct and concise and get right to the point and eliminate, you know, omit needless words. Well, I haven't mastered that one yet, but I had an editor one time that, that one of my books that said, you know, this chapter is great, but it starts with a whole lot of throat clearing. I always remember that. I've been there. One of my favorite quotes. So you do have been doing a lot. And I think that you just, you enjoy this, the getting into the data. You've been doing a lot with analytics and, you know, maybe even suggesting that new ways to look at data, new key indicators that maybe we haven't been taught to look at.

14:11What are some of your favorite kind of new ways that you think we ought to be looking at the data? Should we be able to unearth it? Well, some of the most important insights waiting for you, literally sitting there just a few clicks away, in GA4 are not the most visible. Like you got to go kind of build the thing. Nothing's very visible in GA4. Yeah, it takes a minute. Some examples of useful metrics. What is it or questions to ask and find the answer to the form hypotheses and take action? What is the click-through rate on the call to action on your key pages. You got to make a path exploration.

14:50It takes a few minutes. You got to learn how to do that. That's fine. How does embedding video change the engagement rate on articles? Are there URLs on your website that load with page not found as the title tag? What is the difference in conversion rates for visitors on mobile versus desktop? Which of your articles is inspiring visitors to subscribe to your newsletter? Which URLs on your site have declining search traffic? Like we said a second ago, are they the sales pages? Are they everything? Or is it mostly just your content and articles and guides? These are all extremely useful things to know, like that can guide strategy and budgets.

15:29And, you know, what are the, what's the output from those calories burned? Like it'll tell you, but you got to know where to look. I don't do almost any reporting in Google analytics. I don't build dashboards. I don't just go look at it for its own sake, but I, I do analysis every day. How much are you taking what might be raw data, or at least what you can get out of GA4, and just taking it to AI and say, ask me questions? There's one or two use cases that you almost can't do without AI. For example, if you make a report that shows traffic to your thank you pages, and then add a secondary dimension for date plus time, export that, and AI will make a chart for you showing which day of week people become leads.

16:11there is no Tuesday in GA4. But if you give that report to AI, it'll show you. You can have it make a heat map matrix that show what time of day and day of week. In a colorful little chart, people become leads, people subscribe to your newsletter, people watch videos, anything, any action, any event. The date plus time was useless to me before AI. Yeah, that's interesting. One of the things that I think AI is quite good at, it's basically a mathematician, right? So I think it's quite good at analytics and finding stuff that you're, I mean, it also sometimes makes huge mistakes, but I think that stuff you couldn't even see with your own eyes, I think it really can surface pretty quickly, can't it?

16:54And then John, the next step. So, you know, find for me the campaigns that had the highest engagement rates. Okay. It looks at 200 campaigns and finds these ones had highest engagement rates. now craft 10 new campaigns based on those. The next step after the analysis, that's why AI is really special. It's because you could just immediately go from insight to action or at least brainstorming. Yeah, that's awesome. So where's the noise that you think people ought to be tuning in? The buzzwords, the whatever agentic of the day is? i so in analytics i'm exhausted by reporting and love analysis in seo i'm exhausted by the you know seo is dead or content is dead but i love being discovered for commercial intent key phrases in ai boy that's really just you're asking a really fun question i believe that the responses are not nearly as good unless you have really like a conversation with it, that you're chatting with it, that you give it lots more inputs, including personas, and that you are not just having it make stuff for you.

18:09I'm exhausted by the write this thing for me. I'm really excited by and motivated by the, what are the gaps in this? What else could this do? Give me 10 ideas. How could this be better? So I think there's shifts in every category and that there's, you know, do this stuff long enough and you realize like, actually the fun stuff's right over there. So I know you don't want, or you mentioned that you didn't really want to be seen as like the crystal ball, but on, on some of this stuff, but how far away are we from the idea where a client or a prospect is going to take an action on our website and that's going to trigger for agents to do certain things on our behalf and maybe even have a conversation with that person.

18:55And really, there's an element of removing humans from the entire interaction. I mean, how far away are we from that? Or do you think that buyer behavior will dictate that we never go there? I can easily imagine a CRM setup where when there's a new lead, that it goes and researches this person and brand and then takes the first step toward potentially disqualifying them and then handling some kind of automated conversation, saying like, thanks for reaching out. You're probably not a fit, but maybe check out these other things instead. Here's some alternatives. Here's some possible providers. But the sort of lead scoring thing, if it works, then it builds a whole guide.

19:37It does a bunch of research for you. It looks at Dun & Bradstreet or checks out their LinkedIn profile. And then the rep gets this sort of like little coaching session with AI on how to talk to this prospect. And so, again, that's exactly what you said a few minutes ago, where is it going to make us more efficient in it by setting aside like these low quality leads and help us prioritize relationships by helping us really prep for this really high stakes conversation? So there's a bunch of little uses for AI in there. But yeah, probably every lead should have an appended little sales guide that goes with it with the six questions you should likely ask based on what's happened with them in the news and who you're talking to and what the likely challenges are.

20:22Yeah, and I think that's really going to be the key is we'll remove friction where clients want friction removed, right? They want to do their own research. Maybe they want to get their own pricing, you know, things like that. We'll remove that friction, but then we'll get really smart at where do they actually crave human interaction? Not necessarily need it, but want it. And I think it's that sort of beautiful combination that is going to always be the tight wires. I think so. I think that's making people feel special. Listening, showing them you care. I said it about design a bit ago, certainly in service.

20:56I'm never going to stop caring and talking to people in my head. days like today, eight meetings back to back. Love it. I'll take it. I don't mind a bit. I'm energized by these and conversations just like this one, John. Well, awesome. Well, let's not make it 20 years to the next time. Let's have you back much sooner than that. Again, I appreciate you taking a few moments to drop by. Is there anywhere you want to invite people to connect with you, find out more about your work? LinkedIn. The blue button says follow. But if you find the menu and go to connect with me and just say, Hey, heard you on duct tape.

21:28I'd be more than happy to connect. And then we can have an interaction and we can prioritize relationships and take care of each other. And that's what this is about. Again, appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we'll run into you soon out there on the road. Thanks, John.