Outsmarting AI: Secrets to Human-Centered Marketing

0:08Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Chance. My guest today is Mark Schaefer. He's a futurist and the bestselling author of several influential marketing books, including the content code known and Marketing Rebellion. He's a marketing strategy consultant to many of the world's leading brands and acclaimed keynote speaker and a college educator. His blog, Grow, is one of the most acclaimed marketing blogs globally. And his podcast, Marketing Companion, is in the top 1 % of all business shows on iTunes. We're going to talk about his latest book today, Audacious, How Humans Win in an AI Marketing.

0:49So Mark, welcome back to the show. You've been on several times. Several times, almost a regular.

0:58So I like to start with the title a lot of times. What was kind of the genesis of that for you? Or is there something going on in the world today that says we need to be more audacious. Well, I never have a plan or a schedule to write a book. I only write a book when I see some problem going on that I get curious about. And the problem I see today is that we're trying to discern where do humans fit in this new AI dominant world. and we have this technology that's nipping at the heels of our skill sets in some cases nipping at the heels of our very careers and so i really need to needed to unwind and unpack where are we going to fit where are we going to thrive so really the the main idea of this book is to explore Or the parts, and by the way, I mean, I'm not sugarcoating this saying, oh, kumbaya, it's all going to be great.

2:09I'm saying no, no kumbaya. You know, there's some serious things going on. But there are some places that really are uniquely human and have been somewhat overlooked in the marketing sphere, in the marketing portfolio. I think we've become sort of intoxicated with performance marketing. And I mean, it's important. And I'm talking about SEO and ads and optimizing our content and our ad purchases. That's very, very important. But as we've kind of overcompensated with that, we've kind of forgot about the heart and soul of marketing, which is this human connection. And so in the book, I look at things like word of mouth marketing, which we know is really important, but I would suggest almost nobody listening to this today has a line item on their budget for word of mouth marketing.

3:17I talk about experiential marketing and this idea of shared experiences, which is this lonely, depressed world saying we want more shared experiences. And that, again, is a uniquely human thing. And the overarching umbrella, I guess, is this word, you know, audacious. Because if you're merely competent, you're vulnerable. Competent is ignorable. And marketing really is, I have research in the book that shows in general how dull marketing and advertising is. And there is an opportunity to like shed that skin and really ignite something a little crazy because, you know, the bots are coming. But we still don't crazy.

4:09Again, I find myself blaming the pandemic for so many things on this show when I talk about changes. And, you know, there are societal changes that I think occurred during that period that, like, I sit in a restaurant now waiting on my food to come. And I watch the line and stream of people who come in and pick up their to-go order and run back to their car. And that came, I think, from the pandemic, a lot of that. But I also, you know, we talk about this need for human interaction, but you almost feel like people are actually withdrawing farther by choice. I agree with you. I think remote working is another sort of symptom of something that occurred with the pandemic.

4:57This idea of maybe more comfort with isolation. I think the other thing is that today, each of us can be our own independent media streaming channel. So we can experience our entire world by ourselves through earbuds. We can stream all the movies and TV and music and books that we love. And nobody else even has ever heard of the things that we're experiencing. And that's a key idea in this book that compared to when you and I were growing up as kids, we have a world without shared experiences. You know, when I was a kid, you had to save your money for a record album. And once you got that record album, people would come over to your house to listen to it.

5:49You'd play it over and over again. You'd sing the words, you know, on the liner notes. If you wanted to see a movie, you had to find somebody that had a car. You climb in the car and then you'd have pizza afterwards. And the whole thing is a social experience that is absolutely missing from an entire generation today. And they're crying out for shared experiences. And that's something that we can add in our marketing portfolio. When you bring people together in a meaningful way, and it doesn't have to be an activation. It could even be the way you hold meetings. If you bring people together in this meaningful way that creates some sort of electric kind of experience, it creates this thing called collective effervescence.

6:43It's this emotional contagion of awe. It's everyday awe of being with people and creating something new. And I think that is one of the most overlooked opportunities in marketing today. One of the core ideas of the book is that we have to think about out-humaning AI. Did I say that right? So how do we do that? I mean, it's not through IQ. So how do we do that? Yeah. I mean, isn't that weird that when you think about it, that this is the first time in history where technology has come along and we can't take another class to transcend it, right? I mean, we're not going to be smarter than AI. And so the idea behind the book is one of the biggest issues.

7:39Well, it's the biggest issue for any business today or any marketing professional today is awareness. How do we stand out as the signal against the noise? And again, you know, AI is making that even worse. It's making a lot of noise. It's making endless, infinite noise. So what can we do? And what I did, John, is I got to meet the greatest creatives in the world. And there's a story in the book is kind of like how I started down this path. And one door opened and another door opened. And it was this incredible gift, this amazing experience. And I got to learn, what are the patterns? Is there something we can learn from their success that's scalable to every business?

8:34And what I found is that there is. So your marketing message, the story that you tell the world, has three parts. it's the story the narrative it's where we tell it and it's who tells it now what if we disrupted one of those things we would be doing something that you know ai isn't really thinking about right now i mean ai is looking at the whole world and kind of giving you trying to average it the best average answer of everything that's happened in the in the past but if you if you if you disrupt it and do something unexpected, now you are moving toward a path where you're going to stand out.

9:20And so the book is full of case studies, full of prompts, big companies, small companies, big budgets, no budgets, nonprofits. So there's something in there for everybody to sort of like explore these patterns and and apply it to a business or an organization of any size. Give me an example, if you can think of one off the top of your head, of how a company or a brand can really embrace this idea of everyday awe. Everyday awe. Well, the example that I think is most relevant and personal to me, and I think this would be relevant to anybody, is so I hold a marketing retreat every year called The Uprising.

10:08And the problem I solve with this is, as you know, I used to have this event called Social Slam. You were there. And I mean, I was having 600, 700 people and it was just a blur and it was stressful and I didn't like it. So I created this new event some years later that's limited to 30 people. so it's intimate and we're talking about our relevance in the future of marketing now i put my heart and soul into this and i think i did a good job but when i got the feedback of the event people told me something completely unexpected they said this was life-changing i thought what what life-changing i mean isn't that a little heavy but i heard this over and over again And I never really had an explanation until I connected the dots with this idea of collective effervescence.

11:08So in this group, these 30 people, we hike together in the woods. We eat together gourmet food. And we actually shared family style, right? We create, every single moment is created to heighten interaction, to build on ideas. And as I read, you know, this idea of collective effervescence, I got this from this book called Awe by social psychologist, Dacher Keltner. And all of a sudden, okay, wait a minute. That's the difference. It's this intimacy. It's this emotional contagion that's happening at my event that makes it unlike anything else. And so my marketing plan is add more awe. So it's like, how do I do it even better?

12:13How do I create even more of these magical moments that create new ideas and epiphanies in the people that are there? Just the pure joy of listening to music or singing together or something like that. What can I do to even add more on? That's the marketing plan for my event. And so I challenge people in the book, think about what you can do with your customer interactions, with your meetings, with customer events. What if your marketing plan was add more off? How would that change the dynamic and make you into something different, something conversational, something unmissable, which is what we need to do today?

13:06And the lesson, of course, for that is, I mean, that's the brand people want to gravitate towards, right? And I think that one of the things that everybody talks about this platform or this new tool or this new technology and how marketing has changed. But I've felt for the last 10 years, the way people buy has changed more and that that's what we ought to be paying more attention to. And I think that that's going to even be more relevant, you know, because they're able to think about how they can cut through all the noise. Yeah. Like they can take our 50 page ebook and say, give me the four. They can consume with AI as well as we can produce with AI.

13:46And I think that that gives them even more leverage to only interact with brands that, as you say, create everyday awe. Yeah. And that's an extraordinary point that is quite profound, John, is that a lot of the conversations out there, a lot of the content out there is about how AI is changing our business and changing our workflow. It's creating a lot of new tools to perhaps unleash creativity. But we also need to be thinking about exactly what you're saying is that AI is also changing consumer behavior. It's changing how it's going to consume our content. It's going to change how people make decisions because generally speaking, people don't want to do the work.

14:33They're averse to deep thinking. And so they're going to abdicate that in many cases to AI. I think the idea of truth is going to be sort of mixed up and we may be turning AI to AI, you know, to truth. So I think that's a very, it's a big idea and certainly a worthy conversation. Why don't we just collaborate on another book, Mark? You and I will write that book. Well, let's write that book. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's do it. Let's do it. Well, I saw some research the other day and they were talking about just a year ago, you know, how people were using AI. You know, what was the biggest use case, right?

15:13So producing content, stuff you'd think. And that already in 2025, the fastest growing way that people are using AI is as a companion. Therapy. Yeah, therapy. Yeah. So that behavior that you're talking about is happening and it will drive so much. I mean, I saw that same study and it was sort of jaw dropping. And it's funny because the day after I saw that study, I did a podcast episode with one of my co-hosts and it was kind of a strange episode about how do you keep working? How do you keep leading a business when you're suffering? And so my co-host relies on AI as a therapist. She's actually built like custom GPTs to encourage her and counsel her when she's suffering.

16:09I thought, wow, that is something else. I mean, that is really, I mean, you know, okay, well, it's working for her. Well, you know, the right AI bot's probably got a lot of licenses. Well, and again, this also points to, again, the changes in consumer behavior, because think about it. There's also this emerging preference for AI, let's call synthetic relationships. Right. And I think this this this research about the therapy is sort of a leading indicator of that is that you can be in a relationship with this entity that always tells you the right thing. There's no compromise. Yeah. You don't really have to work on the relationship.

17:04Yeah. And, you know, wow. I mean, what what what are the implications of that going to be? Yeah. Or worse, always tells you what you want to hear. Yeah. Which becomes an enabler rather than a therapist. Yeah. Yeah. So there are many, many ideas in this book that we're not going to get to because I want to veer off to like a really goofy thing that you did. And that's the cover. Oh. So talk a little bit. I mean, it's obviously very on brand with the book, but explain the kind of the concept behind the cover. Well, this is a first in the world book, and I'm very proud of it, actually, because it sort of demonstrates the ideas in the book.

17:49And it demonstrates it in a powerful way, because if you think about books have been published the same way for 200 years, it's almost impossible to disrupt a book. Believe me, I've tried. So this book, the cover of the book is a QR code. And what we did is I uploaded. For the video audience. Oh, yeah. Awesome. I uploaded the book to AI and uploaded some sort of generic art samples. And AI is generating abstract art interpretations of the stories in the book. So when you hover over the cover, it creates new covers endlessly based on the stories in the book. and we're actually like updating it every week.

18:40So there's like more and more stories that are possibilities for the cover. And people love it. You know, it is different. And if you think about it's disrupted the story, it's disrupted where the story is told. It's disrupting who's telling the story. It's not even a human. And I'm getting feedback, John, that even children love playing with the pictures, on the book. So yeah, so I'm very proud of that. And yeah, thanks for mentioning it. You bet. So let's wrap up today with, if I'm listening to this and I'm thinking, I need to disrupt the narrative. What's like the, everybody wants the, give me the one thing I have to do.

19:26What's the one, two, three steps somebody ought to be doing right now to say, how do I get ready for this? Well, the one constant I saw in a lot of the creative thinking behind it is to start with wrong. And if you just sort of like think about iterating or changing a little bit, it doesn't really lead to creative thinking. And some of the best creative thinking comes from Let's flip the script and look at what if everything was just wrong. And I mean, I think the opportunity is this. If you look at most markets today, they're just dull. They're waiting to be disrupted. Every car commercial is the same.

20:13You know, pizza. You know, pizza is supposed to be fun and creative in the celebration. What's the most creative thing going on in pizza? In America, we have this ad. Nobody out pizzas the hut. What in the world does that mean? Can't you do better than that? So look at, start with wrong. That's where we got this US brand, liquid death. The number one lesson I ever learned in marketing class, never associate your brand with death, right? I mean, I encourage you to go to YouTube and Google some of their ads. They're shocking. They make you cringe. I actually was going to show an ad, one of their ads at a conference and it was turned down.

20:56They said, oh, we can't show that. And it's a public ad. Now, the guy who started that was not obsessed with water. He was obsessed with this idea of disrupting the market. And almost every market can be disrupted today because it's so boring, especially in B2B. So that would be one idea. But the book is filled with so many ideas. But that was definitely a common theme I heard in my research. Yeah, I laugh. My kids love, like, you know, their refrigerators are full of liquid death. And I'm like, It's just water. But I will say, you know, I mean, the message there is, you know, it's the brand. It's the connection to the brand.

21:48Fastest growing brand, beverage brand in America. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. Well, Mark, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the Ductate Marketing Podcast. Is there anywhere you'd invite people to connect with you and find out more about Audacious? It's easy to find me. All you have to remember is Businesses Grow. That is my website. You can find my blog, my podcast, and my social media connections. And in the book we talked about today, Audacious, How Humans Win in an AI Marketing World. Yeah. And it's Schaefer with one A, two E's and one F. I mean, I have to look it up every time. I'm sorry.

22:23There's so many ways to spell Schaefer. The other day I was checking into a hotel. I said, my name is Mark with a K. She said, your name is Kark?

22:36So nobody can spell Mark, let alone Schaefer. So don't confuse him, John. Just go to business with Crow. All right. Awesome. Again, it's so great to see you, my friend. And hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road. Thank you, John. Thank you.