How To Produce Better Content With Collaborative AI

0:09Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Janice My guest today is Kate Bradley-Turnish, a former rock and roll DJ turned founder and CEO of Lately.ai, a tool that uses proprietary language models to craft personalized social media messaging. Lately.ai ensures data privacy by not relying on public data sets. Kate's also been a guest speaker at numerous industry events and organizations, including Walmart, Ericsson, and Harvard University. and I don't know, maybe third time back here on the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast as well. Welcome back, Kate. Hey, John.

0:47So great to lay eyes on you. I feel like it's been a little while. It's been. So I know you get tired of telling this story because it's the first thing everybody always asks you, but I know people are going, wait a minute, rock and roll DJ, now founder of a company, like how do you do that? You know, I've gotten better at telling the story too, which is important, I think. And And my co-founder teases me, I do often bury the lead. But yes, guilty as charged. I was broadcasting to 20 million listeners a day with XM Satellite Radio. I was the first music director for a channel called The Loft. But what was interesting to me about radio was the theater of the mind, which you know a lot about being in podcasting.

1:31But to clarify for everybody else, so the theater of the mind is the act of the imagination playing a role either when you're listening or reading, not when you're watching TV, for example. And what you're doing is your imagination is filling in the blanks that you can't see, right? You're imagining what the characters look like or what they're doing. It's why the reason, you know, when you see a movie and you've already read the book, you're kind of mad because it's never as good as what you'd imagined, right? Well, or like a lot of people, I love to listen to baseball as opposed to watch it because baseball announcers are so much better at describing what's going on because they have to.

2:05They have to. And they're so crafty. I mean, they're just, it's, that's a real sport in itself, you know, exactly. Great point. So I was, and when I was in radio, I'm old enough so that there wasn't social media when I first started and, or the internet and you couldn't look people up. And so we would kind of mess around and play tricks on the listeners and, you know, make up these scenarios, right? It was fun. And I had written hundreds of commercials because I learned quickly that was how you made money in radio and I was a fiction writing major. And I saw these parallels between wielding the mic and wielding the pen and listening and reading.

2:42And what I, my, my boss, I was number one in our format, which was very rare because it was called triple A or adult album alternative. There's only a handful of stations in the country, but we were like, and even fewer women and even fewer women. Yeah. Yeah. It was just like terribly random thing I fell into, but like, Country and rock, those stations are number one. And so my bosses were like, what are you doing? And I'm like, well, I did know what I was doing. I threw out their playlists and I was running the whole show because all the content was produced by me, all the commercials, all the drops, everything during my time.

3:18But I looked into it more. This is a long story. I hope it's interesting. And I read this book called This Is Your Brain on Music. You guys remember, I think Daniel Levin did that. Hard read. It's a thick read, but it's about the neuroscience. of music and music listening. And I learned something interesting about the parallel of music listening and theater of the mind. All of this relates to Lately somehow, but I'll share. So when your brain listens to a new song, John, what songs do you like, by the way? Are you a classic rock guy? Yeah, I mean, I listen to The Loft and occasionally jump over and listen to Earl Bailey.

3:54That was my station. Yeah, I love Earl. He's so great. Yeah, so great. Oh my God. You're making me reminisce. So great quality music, you know, rock and roll. That's for, I think I'd say intelligent rock and roll, let's say. Yeah. What I was learning from Daniel was that when your brain listens to a new song, it must instantly access every other song you've ever heard before. And it's trying to index that new song in the library of the memory of your brain. This is happening like in a moment, right? Makes sense. And of course, in order to access all that memory, it's pulling on nostalgia and emotion, obviously memory all those things that create trust and trust is why we buy now guess what when the theater of the mind kicks in same thing happens nostalgia memory emotion trust and when you're doing a good job on the mic john you actually make your listeners feel as though they're talking you're talking to them directly yeah that this one-way street is a two-way street and they have ownership in the conversation yeah and writing is the same thing and it's a complicated feet to do it well because you're talking to nobody, but also somebody specific.

5:06That's the magic. So I took these ideas to a little company called Walmart and I got them 130 % ROI year over year for three years with what became the prototype for lately. Screw it. We're not going to talk about lately. Let's just talk about the Jayhawks latest published. Oh my God. You're so funny. I took out their last, I don't know if it was their last record, but the one with Cloud, something Cloud, it was their last like really poppy record from the nineties. And I was, I had that in my, I still have a CD player in my car and I was rocking to that record because I love it so much. Any other Jayhawks fans listening to us?

5:47I wonder. Of a certain age. But it was our names. Yeah, for sure. But I love that record. And it got panned for being too poppy, but I think it's a real lot of gold in there. Absolutely. So let's talk about content marketing. AI seems like daily is changing. I mean, content marketing has changed dramatically over the last decade or so, but certainly AI seems to be changing it every day. What's your take on how it's changing really the whole landscape of content marketing? Well, I mean, thanks a lot, ChatGPT, because now everybody can make more garbage than ever before. They made our jobs a lot harder.

6:24The task for marketers, the challenge has always been, how do we cut through the noise, right? And now there's just noise. So that certainly has changed the landscape. One thing that I'm seeing, and I wonder if you are, which is astonishing to me, the laziness is not changing, right? So specifically with generative AI and text generative AI, which is where I live, people still hate writing. They don't want to do it. But also their value behind it is save time as opposed to be more effective. That's shocking. And honestly, I'll ask our own clients this question all the time. And the CEO or the CRO, they want to make more money, but the actual users are thinking of save time.

7:08And getting them to be aligned is a challenge. You know, my take on this a little bit, I agree with you, at least we're in this phase right now of more noise. But I think eventually, like all things, people are going to go, it's pretty easy to separate noise from signal. You know, maybe even more so now, right? Because, you know, writing quality content still takes strategic thinking. And I think it makes people who do strategic thinking even more valued, even though right now there are a lot of them are feeling sort of undervalued. Yeah. So on parallel with that, And so there's this symbiotic relationship between AI and humans who can think strategically and analytically.

7:49Absolutely. And they rely upon each other, right? And it's called collaborative AI. This is the year of collaborative AI, in my opinion. We built collaborative AI into lately from the beginning, which you know. But it's the idea of a human analyzing and course correcting what the AI generates so that it can boost the learning. here's what's fascinating about what we're what you said which is the number one vacuum of skills across the globe is guess what the ability to analyze and the reason that is is because we had this is back to laziness too we've become a culture unable to identify problems because for so long especially in corporate life it was like don't bring me a problem bring me a solution right so even when like i have a friend who has some teenage daughters and when they need to go they know they can google the answer to anything but they don't know what to type in yeah right well and that's so many things brought up there the you know what i tell people all the time is what we're left to provide is context that context cannot be provided by chat gpt and so that's to your point of the search.

9:04I mean, a lot of it is the right context produces the right answer, but these machines are basically just going into a database and saying, here's what I think the answer is. Whereas we are saying, well, no, here's what, here's the real problems the customer is telling us they're struggling with and, you know, why our solution or whatever it is we're selling is, you know, the answer for them. And I think short of having that understanding, you know, it's a crapshoot what you're going to get back. Yeah. I mean, that, thank you. I'm going to steal that the context because it is so true someone was just asking me the other day well should i second guess everything that late lately generates for me and i said yes you're still the king the humans we are still the king of the food chains of course you know and he's like well won't ai know better than me and i'm like never no like all ai is good at doing is now is synthesizing scale really right yeah in fact i've been for a long time you know because i don't really think it's AI, to be truthful.

10:03It's not really artificial intelligence. Turn it around. It's more informed assistance is kind of how I talk about it. Do you ever feel like TV ads are just for the big guys? Well, not anymore. Ad Critter makes it easy and affordable for small business owners to run targeted, connected TV ads that drive real results. Their full funnel approach combines high-impact connected TV ads with precise digital retargeting so you can easily reach your audience across platforms and keep your business top of mind. And the best part, Ad Critter takes care of the tricky stuff. Just upload your customer data and they handle the rest.

10:43And try it out for yourself. Right now, duct tape marketing listeners get a dollar-for-dollar match on any TV campaign up to$5 ,000. That means if you spend$5 ,000 on TV ads, you'll get an additional$5 ,000 to spend. Head on over to adcritter.com. That's adcritter.com and get started. All right. So I'm going to ask you a really hard Lately question. You and I started talking about Lately three or four years ago, at least. And at that point, three or four years ago, what Lately was doing was very cutting edge. People didn't necessarily understand it, but it definitely produced a result that was very cutting edge.

11:21Fast forward to today, everything you buy now has AI in it, supposedly, like your detergent now has AI in it, I think, if you buy it. So what's the differentiator or what's your stay ahead, cutting edge play? Yeah. Yeah. So that's a great question. Well, a couple of things. Yeah, it's a hard one. And there's like functional answers and then there's kind of aesthetic answers, as I'm going to call them. But so functionally, we're the only generative AI that I know of where we have a continuous performance learning loop plugged in so that the results that we generate for you are always tied to your personal analytics or the analytics of your company, which is to say it's never out of thin air.

12:07So all other generative AI doesn't know you in any way and can never give you results that are essentially really meaningful. The other component there is the collaborative AI. So because we built that into the product, the whole product, originally, we have kind of pole vaulted over everybody else. Harvard Business Review just released an article about collaborative AI, citing lately as a leader. And one of the studies they did show that collaborative AI outperforms AI alone 2 to 7x every time. But on the sort of aesthetic side, Again, what's really interesting to me is that save time piece. So, of course, we save time like everywhere else, but that is not our cutting edge leg up.

12:55The leg up is we show you why, right? Why it's effective. What's the DNA of the messaging that will get you the highest response? And I think what we've done a poor job of is actually leveraging how well we do that and what that value is. So I've called upon my engineering team for this year to actually do a better job of getting people to understand this information and how to use it. That's what's fascinating to me. I can show you these words, John. I can show you the ideas, the sentence structures, all the things that will get you the most engagement, but people then don't know what to do with it, which is like, to me, duh, but that is the crux.

13:37right the last answer to your question is going even deeper here so i'm planning an integration with my friend david allison who owns the value graphics database and value graphics are identifying how to group people by what they care about as opposed to demographics which is more insightful radically more insightful they consult the united nations yeah and so like some characteristics would be like, if I care about the environment and you're selling me lipstick, you want to sell me lipstick that talks about how great it is for the environment, right? Or if you're selling me lipstick and I care about family, you want to mention that the family company has been around for a hundred years, passed on by daughter, whatever.

14:22And so we're working on a way of integrating these values inside lately so you can get more of that why and understand who your target audiences and why are they responding to the content we're generating for you? Kind of nerdy? I don't know. I'm excited about this. No, but I think you're absolutely right. I mean, I've been saying for years, I'd rather, I mean, my target market is based on behavior, not on, you know, how old somebody is. It's what they value. It's do they invest in the community? I mean, do they invest in their industry? Those are how we actually identified some of those behaviors.

14:56And I feel like that's a way to actually niche down is to focus on behavior. So having obviously tools that, and I'm guessing that you're going to go into personalization, you know, at some point with that level of segmentation as well. Let me ask you, I said in the intro in your bio, I mentioned the idea of data privacy. I know, you know, it's a big deal. How much does the market perceive this idea of public data sets versus privacy versus I don't know what you're talking about? Yeah, pretty huge. And it's another arena of AI where everybody thinks they know all about it, but they don't, which is kind of the whole trend of the last year.

15:35So some companies come to us with like an AI task force. And that has to be part of one of the initial calls where they're, we're checking the boxes for them, you know, the safety boxes with their legal and IT teams, which we check a lot of those boxes. Because then there's other companies like PwC who've gone full on into AI and they don't seem to really care. And then there's a lot of companies where they know people are using it, even though there's maybe a ban on ChatGPT throughout the company, but people are using it anyways. So there's nothing consistent for sure. my husband actually just bought chat chapt for his phone because he didn't want to put on his work computer but he wants to be able to use it for work to help him do things faster smarter better you know of course i think there's a lot of that going on yeah yeah what i understand you know i mean it's stupid it's stupid i mean i it's like i can write a formula in excel or i can just dump all this in to say give me the answer you know so i use it all the time for stuff like that right?

16:40But maybe we better back up just a minute because I asked that question assuming a lot and assuming that people knew what, you know, that really meant. So when I go to chat GPT, everything that's being put in there is helping teach the entire language model and, you know, everything from my, you know, customer statistics to my Google analytics that I'm getting analyzed. I mean, that's all just being fed, right? And then theoretically, in some fashion, anybody has access to it that, I mean, not specifically to it, but it's feeding the machine that then is going to produce something. Whereas the private data set, you know, that is, if I come to Lately and I put that same kind of information in there, it's only going to be used to build my personal model.

17:22Is that the way to sort of explain it? That's correct. Yeah. We don't take any of your information and muddy it with anybody else's. And like the one thing we can see is the patterns that if things are working well for you and they're working well for another customer we can see those patterns but we don't share them with you individually we would take the knowledge and share it at large and so that's been a real win for us by the way is because i mean i've been asked i've been asked to actually give courses on ai to educate companies on why that exact thing matters yeah i think david allison not david allison david mirman scott who was an investor and friend he put it succinctly where to help people understand, you know, he was like, listen, there's only two questions that matter.

18:08Who's data and who's math with Chachi BT. It's the world's, it's your data. It's, you know, the world's data, everybody's data and general math, like a general generic math with lately. It's your private data and then our math on top of it, you know? So I need two more questions. I'm going to ask you the first one, And just because we haven't, you know, you and I have talked a number of times. It's like, you know, that idea of like, oh, yeah, we have listeners too. If somebody came to you and said, Lately, I kind of heard of that. What does Lately do? How would you describe what Lately does? Oh, I'm so bad at this.

18:44It's like the shoemaker has no shoes, but I'm evolving. So Lately learns the patterns of when you write well, what helps you do that. And it also learns the patterns of what your unique audience will actually reply to on social media. And then we help you evolve that model by repurposing long-form content and identifying what part of that content will actually get you the highest possible engagement on social. How did that go? So that was great. So the output could be a blog post. No, that was very good. It was still maybe a little off it. So the end output is a blog post or is a LinkedIn post or is a X post, right?

19:26Yeah, the output is a social media post, but and so much more. I mean, it's really the insights to know this is why we have investors like you and David Merman Scott and others is like, there's so much potential in what we've identified. How can we evolve the product to really give you more? you know so an entrepreneurial question to send us out does do you think because i know you haven't done this a hundred times do you think that working in an industry that is evolving so quickly is make it makes it even harder to evolve a business oh i mean there i the challenges are yes for sure but there's so many other smaller challenges that i didn't expect that seemed to me to eclipse that.

20:14Some of it's being a female entrepreneur, let's be honest. Some of it's working through a pandemic. I think the way that we come at this from radio, from this totally unfathomable background, gives us a huge insight as a company, not just me, at how we go at AI. And we go at it very humanly because that's just how we did it from the beginning. So I love that what we're able to see about the benefits of it are often inside out of what everybody else is seeing. And I feel really proud about that. Yeah, that's really interesting because I do think a lot of people approach this as what can the machine do?

20:52And I think that you're actually saying our point of view is, you know, how do we get the output that's going to have the most impact from a neuroscience point of view? And I think that's a harder one to explain probably, but it's certainly more impactful than a machine view for sure. I just got a Kennedy chill. So like not what can the machine do for you, but what can you do for your machine? I like it. I like it. Okay. T-shirts. Let's start printing T-shirts right now. We have to. All right. Kate, it was great catching up with you. You want to, obviously we've mentioned lately.ai numerous times.

21:30Is there anywhere else somebody should connect with you? They can find me in all the places. LinkedIn, I'm just playing Kate Bradley. and tell me that you met me with John and that we can be friends. Okay, awesome. Well, it was great catching up with you again. Hopefully we'll run into you soon out there on the road.