How to Use AI Without Sounding Like Everyone Else, with Phil Treagus-Evans, CEO & Co-Founder at Giraffe Social | Ep. 433

0:07Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the f*** up. We are back with another episode of the Marketing Millennials podcast. Today, I have the co-founded CEO of Giraffe Social, Phil, and he's also the author of Human First Marketing. And this is a good time to talk about human-first marketing, especially in the age of AI. So I'm excited to chat. Welcome to the show, Phil. Thanks, Daniel.

0:57Good to be here. Could you give me a little background how you got into marketing and your journey? Sure. So I think it's fair to say that I stumbled into marketing. I didn't necessarily plan to do that. So when I was around 21, 22, a friend of mine and I, we decided to start a business. and being as wonderfully naive as you can only be at 21, we thought, hey, why don't we start the next big social network? So we tried to launch a social network with very little money, very little experience or knowledge. And although the website itself didn't last, the marketing that we did for it was all through social.

1:37And whilst we were doing that, our friends who had bands or family members who had businesses were asking, do you think you could do this for us? and it was early enough that social media was still only really just starting to be used for marketing so we stumbled into it and we decided to start giraffe as a bit of a a plan b a bit of a safe a safer option and uh yeah actually today is giraffe's 14th birthday so we've been around for quite a while now i think we're gonna say happy birth sing happy birthday on the pod happy birthday um thanks man uh i'm excited to chat also because i think marketing has got a very a lot noisier especially with all the ai there and you wrote a whole book of why the answer is more human not more automated let's start with what is human first marketing sure so human first marketing is about keeping people at the center of your marketing strategy so i think a lot of people assume it's anti-ai but it's it's not really like i i love ai use it every day i think everyone does but it's more about just trying to understand where to use it and when the book really is is it covers the two main areas so when we say human first marketing one side of that is internal.

2:58So using your team in marketing, executives being more visible on social media, and then the other side of it is your customers and trying to understand your customers at a slightly deeper level, making content that's a lot more relevant for them, and potentially even making content with them through influencer marketing or UGC sort of work. We've seen time and time again over the years at Giraffe that the marketing strategies and the campaigns that we that have people in them always outperform everything else. And I think with AI and just the sheer quantity of rubbish that is being churned out now because of the ease, I always say that I think people now in marketing is rare, and rare is valuable.

3:39So, you know, we know that when we include people in our marketing, we see better results. But also I just think it's better. I just think it's better for marketers and better for customers. I want to also ask, since you've been doing this in the space for 14 years, as you just said, you've seen influencer marketing explode. You've seen iPhone recorded videos outperform the polished branded content. Now you're seeing AI flood every channel. What do you think has stayed constant throughout all of it in the last 14 years? Good question. I think influencer marketing, the common thread with that is people.

4:21And I'm going to sound like a broken record now, but I think people trust people more than brands. So influencer marketing is a bit of a no-brainer when you think about it. But I think, ironically, influencer marketing has almost gone full circle now, where I think people are a little bit more savvy. And they're a little bit more suspect when they think, why are you promoting toothpaste? Like when you usually post about sports. you know so i think people are a lot more savvy to these things the sort of raw authentic style content is really interesting so i think that a lot of that stemmed from the pandemic because we had a real supply and demand problem of statistically people were spending more time on social media than ever before because we were all stuck at home bored out of our minds but the ability to produce content was more restricted than ever we no longer did we have studios and and models and lighting and all these sorts of things so we really had an option it was either post less create less content or create slightly realer more authentic content and that's what we did the results were better and i think after the pandemic you saw that that continued brands continued to create content in that style that sort of low-fi uh low-fi style content yeah i think the pandemic changed so much for i mean especially part of your marketing strategy is human first internal and back six years ago internal was you would go into an office you would be sitting next to your co-workers you would go into meeting rooms you would be going on those coffee work um walks how do you maintain that as a a marketing team to make sure that that that human connection is still there with your teammates even though you aren't in the same room as marketing used to be six years ago.

6:11Yeah. So the pandemic was a real challenging time, obviously for lots of people and for lots of businesses. What was the craziest thing about it for us as a business was that when we came into the office and we'd have made loads of hires during the pandemic. So these were people that we'd been seeing every day online, but had never actually met face to face. It was like this really bizarre experience of, oh, that person's taller than I thought they would be. and all these like weird little things you didn't know about each other. But yeah, we tried our best during the pandemic to create content like this, to be fair, like podcasts, joining video calls, these sorts of things.

6:48As an agency, we are hybrid. So we work from home most of the time and we meet as a full team twice a month. And what we do is we protect those days to be all about collaboration, being creative, producing content together. So if you were to go to our TikTok, for example, you would see lots and lots of content of the team producing videos and these sorts of things. I think for businesses, it's about carving out the time to make sure that you make the space and you make the time for creating sort of team driven content. Yeah, I agree. And I also think I know how to make the space for this, but making space for spontaneity of meetings.

7:27meetings. I feel like some of my best ideas with my co-workers back in the day was never in the meeting where we discussed the ideas. It was like, oh, let's go to a coffee. And then suddenly we're talking about the campaign and then ideas are flowing and we're getting closer. It's just protecting that spontaneity would be cool. But I also want to go into one part. I know that one of the foundations of your book is trust. And it is also like one of the slowest things and marketing to build. So when you're talking to marketing leaders or founders or whoever you're talking to, and they're chasing that the next quarter pipeline, how do you like defend trust to that?

8:12Yeah, it's really difficult. I think trust is the most important metric in marketing and also probably the hardest, if not impossible to measure. And I think when you're dealing with senior leadership teams, if something can't be measured, it's deemed not important. And I think that is a shame. And I think marketing kind of needs to get back to being, I feel like marketing used to be an art form. And I feel like now it's becoming a science. And there's places where I think that's good. And obviously I'm not saying don't measure things, but I don't think everything has to be measured. And trust is, as I say, it's the most important thing in marketing.

8:51If you don't trust a brand, you're not going to buy the products or the service, like regardless of how well people click through an ad or these sorts of things so i always kind of say that trust i don't think trust is there to be lost i think it's there to be earned we are in a trust deficit we see it in the in the edelman trust barometer reports they put out every year like people don't trust brands they don't trust ceos so that's the first point is to accept that we are starting in a deficit it's not already there and we can lose it we have to earn it in the first place. And I think trust is about being consistent.

9:26It's about being visible, which is huge. I think so many executives, especially, you just never see them. They don't post, they don't talk, they don't. You might hear them in a sort of report that comes out that you need a master's in statistics to be able to understand what they're talking about. I just want executives to be real people and to actually be out there talking about the work, talking about the brand and being a bit more transparent a bit more authentic not having to make everything polished and perfect and just being a little bit more raw and a little bit more real and we see that when that happens customers are more willing to forgive mistakes or errors or you know missteps if they have that visibility built in yeah i agree i used to i always think about this in like sports terminology because I played like college sports and I always think that like the players I trust the most were just consistently showing up and doing what they said they were going to do next to me so I'm like if I if they were like the players that one day were amazing and the next day were horrible and the next day I thought they had the ability to be great as a like a player but I didn't have thought they had the ability to be trusted next to me because I didn't know next if they're going to have that moment where they break through or the moment where they're just being but if someone was a consistently b plus or a minus every single day i thought okay i know what i'm going to get from this person even though they might not ever be that a plus at least they're consistently coming out and showing that they're going to be like an a minus or b plus next i mean i think about that in marketing too if you consistently show up above average and with your audience like you are there's that trust being built that okay they this brand is here they're consistently helping me they consistently i know what i'm going to get from them and they're not going to be one moment doing something amazing in the next moment being gone like they're ghosting yeah there's a there's a term in sports that i really like which is that the best ability is availability like players who are always available is one of the best abilities a sports person can have, especially in team sports.

11:41So yeah, I completely agree with the analogy. I also want to ask you, so your book breaks down basically three assets, your audience, like your team and your personal brand. I would say that like a lot of marketing teams, I mean, not saying they do it great, but a lot of companies focus on the audience part. Why do you think a lot of people underutilize the other two where the personal brand and the team aspect because i feel like one of the best most underrated marketing forms is internal marketing which 100 so many people forget that it's also part of the marketer's job like you think that your whole job is to get more customers get more revenue get but like you also are trying to sell your ideas internally to make sure that that happens so why do you think those are the two most underutilized assets?

12:37In a word, I think fear. I think there's a fear. I remember being on a panel and talking about employee advocacy and someone put their hand up and said, yeah, but how do you know how to trust your team to say the right thing and to not say the wrong thing? And what if they don't want to and you have to force them? And I just thought you're completely getting the wrong end of this. It starts with building a brand and a company and a culture that your team want to post about what it is you're doing. I think that's the main thing. So, yeah, I think fear. I think especially when we're dealing with big corporates, there's a fear of, oh, yeah, but what if we let the team loose and they don't get the branding spot on or the tone of voice is so different?

13:19And I think the main thing there is you have to let go. You have to, for it to work, you kind of have to let go. because if you want people to engage with your team members when they're posting to social if it feels like they're a puppet with the brand's arm up their back you might as well not do it like it's not going to work so you kind of have to let go a little bit and allow your team the freedom to to be themselves and to post about their work and to post about their career and their beliefs and what they do obviously you can put guardrails in place to say things like oh this is the person's views not the company that sort of thing and then it's the same with the personal branding side i think it's fear i think it's i think it's fear of putting yourself out there to be judged and worrying about what people might think and i would say you probably experience this less in the u.s because your culture is a lot more sort of pro i don't know just supporting people and celebrating people whereas the uk is quite cynical and i think there's a bit of a fear around putting yourself out there and trying to talk about what you believe and talk about what you think and what are people going to think about this and who am I to talk about this you know like there's a lot of that we deal with a lot of that so yeah I think the main thing is fear I agree I also think one of my good friends she's actually in the UK Amelia she says that I believe this too is like if you're not if you don't trust your employees to post like you're probably hiring the wrong employees have you really done if you really don't trust them to post on social and your your fear like what like and it goes down to the principle we talked about before like it comes down like do you trust your team or not do you trust and the same into externally do you trust your team or not if you don't trust your team then you have a culture problem or you have a hiring problem or you have some sort of a guardrail problem this is one of those are happening yeah 100 and that's why in the book and complete transparency i started writing the stuff about your team and your audience.

15:21And then I quickly realized that for this to work, you have to have your values and your culture nailed down. And I'm a big believer that there's an intrinsic line between culture and marketing. And I think you have to have that nailed down, especially if you are going to do sort of employee advocacy or trying to get your executives to post. I think culture is everything for that. I think that one prediction I have around hiring specifically is that, and I think we're already seeing it, but I see hiring is going to become more and more like influencer marketing. I think when you're hiring someone into your team, you'll look at their resume, but you'll also look at their social.

16:01Does this person have lots of followers? Do they have a personal brand? Do they post about the brand they work for at the moment? And you will be seeing people as not just employees and team members, but also promoters, like people who are going to come in and be an advocate for the brand. I know that's something that we do when we're hiring we will look at their social and if i go on their linkedin and i can see like oh they're always posting about where they work and they're always talking about what they do and these sorts of things like i love that and i think that's clearly someone who's passionate but they also understand how advocacy works so yeah i think that's going to play more and more of a role and it's a reason for people to think about their personal brands even if you think i don't need a personal brand it's going everyone has one so you have to think about it consciously i remember when like like employee advocacy because he like six seven years ago six years ago was becoming like a thing not a thing but like starting and i remember the people who got it just saw each new hire as just another social channel that's like the people who got it is that i mean it doesn't mean they are and it's expected to be a social channel but they saw like okay a new employee means there's a potential for a new channel and if i if we do this employee advocacy program right and we teach people how like how to create a good post or like we supply content to help them create a good post or we do things internally to promote and show and our leaders are doing it so they know it's okay we have another social channel to to get our reach out which is pretty much a free free social channel that's tapping into and the data shows that the reach and the engagement levels of those channels of a person's presence is always way way higher than a company's one so you know it's not just another channel it's also like a more effective channel and then i want to ask you first before i move on to the next part is and now it is pretty much like there's like words like employee generated content now like egc and then there's like poor advocacy programs i think it is a buzzy topic that people are talking about but in its core, what makes it work?

18:11What do brands need to think about if they wanted to start their own employee? Where does it start? What are like the fundamental pillars to make sure that it becomes successful and it's not just, hey, post this post or like posting the channel and say, everybody hype up this post for me. That's what the old days was like. There was a pump channel in every company where you post something and you put it in. There's still a little bit of that. Yeah, exactly. There's a lot of bit of that, but yeah. I think the thing to start with is not to be Simon Sinek here, but like to start with why to give your team the reason of like why this is useful and not just useful for the business, but useful for them.

18:53and that comes back to what I was talking about earlier that having a personal brand even if it's not something you're thinking about that you want to use now in the future when it comes to maybe a different position whether it's a case of just creating opportunities for yourself I think it's about encouraging the team to see the benefit for them personally not just for the company because I think if you go into it with the mindset of we need you to do this because it's going to benefit the business unless you have an insanely good culture the team are going to be a bit skeptical and a bit like i don't know if i want to do that whereas if it's a look this is why it's beneficial for you actually yes it benefits us but actually long term this is worth doing for you i think that's where it starts and you mentioned it earlier that getting buy-in from founders from executives but also from like key influential people within the team because from my experience it isn't always about seniority sometimes there are people in teams who are the go-to but everyone kind of looks to say is this okay should we be doing this and i think if you can find who those people are and win them round and say this is why it's beneficial you're more likely to get people to buy in to doing it and then you start getting into the gamification of it to give it longevity to try and make it engaging and interesting in the long term yeah i also think like besides like leaders doing it i honestly believe like you need some sort of evangelist that gets the audience more than anybody so like if you're selling to let's say gardeners if you had someone who like knew how to create good gardening content and they understand gardeners better than everybody I think a lot of teams are marketers trying to be in the shoes of their audience, but they've never done gardening or they've never done.

20:53I mean, it's easier for marketers to sell to marketers because marketers are marketers. But it's harder when you're trying to put yourself in the shoes. So that's why I think like bringing on a creator, bringing on an evangelist, bringing on someone who knows the audience to help talk through like the hard talking points that your audience doesn't get is. I saw that when I was at some companies, we hired either customers out of their like internally or we hired evangelists, like someone who was like in the industry who was talking about this and they became like a face in the company. So then people had more like they saw we investing in like people who are doing this.

21:35Yeah. It's always crazy to me when I say to people when I'm trying to help them understand their customers. I always say like, have you just picked up the phone and spoke to them and sort of asked them about what's going on for them right now? And the answer is always no. Like I think everyone universally thinks it's a good idea, but people don't seem to actually do it. And yeah, like that's so key. Like it's so key. I think the longer that goes where you're not actually having that conversation with your client, the more warped your view and idea of what it is they want or what it is they're interested in or what's important to them.

22:09It just becomes more and more warped to the point where it's just no longer connecting. I love the idea of bringing someone internally who's like the voice of the customer. I mean, that's a great idea. I mean, it's a lost art of picking up the phone. And I think it's a hard, like we've lost the art of just picking up the phone or just like visiting our customers or we've lost. It's like an art that needs to come back because especially like we're talking about this now, like human first. I do think there's like a pendulum swing that's happening where everybody's being so digital that humans are going to start craving analog again and human experiences and being with humans and seeing humans and trusting humans.

22:51And when they see a video, they want to see someone consistent that's not AI. And no, it's not written by AI. And even though I love AI, I think it's just like humans always go like anti when something's too much in society. I know you've thought about this for a long time and you've seen it through different phases. What do you think human first marketing looks like in this age versus like when AI didn't exist? I like something you said there about like going almost backwards a little bit. And I think I say that in the book at one point that if you were to speak to your grandparents, they would remember a time when they knew the name of their butcher and the person who run the local store and all of these little things that seem a little bit cliche.

23:38but I think people are craving that. They are craving that sort of, is there a better feeling in the world than walking into your regular cafe and them saying, do you want your usual? Like the little warm, fuzzy feeling inside. Like I think that is the human connection and I think that's what we're trying to get back to. I think in the age of AI, I think human first marketing is even more important because obviously it's becoming more and more rare and that's just making people crave that human connection. And it's just so like scrolling through any social network now. It's just, I don't know.

24:15It's just, it's difficult to do at times because it's just, it's just so clear that so much of this is just churned out by AI. And I was doing some research recently and found on LinkedIn, I found about 50 posts that were almost identically written, like same word for word content. It just makes me want to cry. I think it's awful. but at the same time i also think that when something like ai or a technology comes along you alluded to this people tend to have a they like to remove the nuance and sort of be quite binary it's either good or it's bad and people are either like ai is everything and here's how you can use ai to run your whole life and then the other side is ai is the devil get rid of it don't use it people use it are bad and the reality is it's a spectrum it's not as black and white as that.

25:04It's a lot more nuance involved. So I always say like, I'm not anti AI, I'm anti lazy AI. I think if you are just going into AI and saying, write me 10 posts about marketing, and then you just copy and paste them into LinkedIn, that sucks. I mean, that's a bad use of AI. But if you're using it to say, hey, here's some ideas I have about marketing, and this is kind of my belief, and I want you to help me structure it into a post, I have less of an issue with that. I think so long as you still have that human taste element i think that's the key yeah i think what i also think is like at some point it actually is a little good this is my take when it's like that there there were people out there that had really good ideas and really understood their topic but they just inherently weren't the best way of putting it on paper so i think ai is going to give the belly to people like that who have good taste and have expertise that maybe aren't the best writers or studied writing to share their ideas, their brain.

26:10Because I think a lot of ideas don't get shown because people, one, don't have time, two, they're scared of writing because they don't think they're a good writer or they just don't want to be on video. But at least AI has got through partial of that hurdle where the time gap is closed. So I think that it could be, what you said, human first if you're just writing into ai here's my idea this is what i'm thinking about this is how it structures this person i just need help with the grammar part of it or like i need help like structuring it to like people could read it easily and simplify it and you working with ai as a thought partner because i think there's so many ideas trapped in the brains of people doing things that aren't in the world and i think ai will help that but also i'm very scared of the lazy side of it and the lazy people are tend to are winning out right now with a lot of their I spoke to someone recently who suffers from really severe dyslexia and they made the exact case you just made that they're an excellent speaker they can talk for hours on their subject but when it came to actually writing it down into like social media posts it they just didn't do it because they just it was too much of a struggle and whereas ai has kind of facilitated them to be able to do that and i think yeah there are uses of it like that which are awesome i think that's a great way for it to be used but i also think ai is like too many people think of it as just literally something that can write stuff right a blog post right you know a social media post but you're scratching the surface for me the way i use ai the most is as like a almost like a sparring partner, like an intellectual sparring partner where I say, look, this is, especially with my writing, this is what I think.

27:58Why am I wrong? What am I not seeing? Trying to like get it to actually poke holes in your thinking and challenge you. I think it's a really great use of it. I agree because I use it intensely for that. And then I use it. One of my biggest issues as a marketer, even in marketing ops back in the day, it was just It's like there's so much data out there and it took so much time to look through it and analyze it. And it would take as a marketer, you would be like send it to the data analyst team and you'd have to submit a ticket. And then the ticket had to come in and then the data will come in three to a week later.

28:35And then that data is old. So you have to get that. So now it like spits things out like really fast. I mean, obviously, you still need eyes as a marketer to see it, but it spits things out really fast. which I think that's a good use case too. But I do think we overly index on people writing things with AI and that's where people are also becoming anti-AI because people are using it for things like just spitting things out, the content side, but they're not thinking about workflows and data analysis and research and things that would have taken people years to figure out because they could put two things together If you give it 50 different data articles or research papers and they can find the connection between all of them, which would have taken us days to read through those papers and then days like underlining and then days looking at it.

29:31So I think I agree with you on that. I think back to like when, and I'm dating myself here, but like when the internet first became widely used. and I think there was a lot of point there where people were saying like oh it's almost like cheating to google something and you should be looking it up in a book and these sorts of things whereas now that would seem ridiculous if we want to find information we would just go to the internet and I think we're in that that sort of pattern right now with AI where we're kind of normalizing how it fits into society and into our culture generally. Yeah I think the ridiculousness of like school making us memorize things when we don't need to memorize it instead of like how to like how things actually work and the behind the scenes of why it works and why it's applicable into everyday life.

30:22I think that's where we missing it. I'm missing the chip sometimes is that part of it. I also want to ask you about what like influence in marketing really has like matured in a lot of ways of as like a core channel for some brands. What do you think is working now that three to five years ago wasn't working? I think influencer marketing has flipped on its head. I think when it first became a thing, audience size was the most important factor. Work with influencers who have millions of followers so you can get the reach. But now what we're seeing is that actually you're probably better off working with micro influencers, nano influencers who have much smaller audiences.

31:05but the engagement and the trust is like much much higher so rather than work with one mega influencer of 10 million followers maybe work with 10 micro influencers who all have smaller audiences but a lot more trust in their audience to believe what it is they're saying i think that's really really key that's definitely one of the things the other thing that we're seeing as well is like it seems counterintuitive but almost scaling back on the creative briefing i think in the past it would be very like, we want you to create a video. You need to say this, here's a script. You need to say these things, but to try and create that authenticity and to allow a creator to create something that feels like them, that isn't going to be super jarring to their audience and actually feels, oh yeah, this could actually just be their genuine sort of feelings on this.

31:54I think that's really key. So we've been trying to scale back a little bit in terms of how much creative briefing we do when we're going into an influencer campaign and trying to have the clear beats of what we want to cover but allowing them the creative freedom to to freestyle a little bit it's actually funny because the word creative brief signals brief and then we people some people give you books and and five page things and it's like You were supposed to brief them and tell them what you kind of the guardrails of what you want to this campaign. Not I give them every single. It's not like an instruction manual.

32:36It's just an overview of what you want. And we've got away from that word brief, which means brief, like compact, basically. It comes back to what we talked about with fear and trust. I think in the same way that brands are a little bit scared of letting their employees post, they're probably a little bit scared about having someone completely external to the business post. So they want to brief to the extent where, yeah, you're almost just limiting the person and sort of making the whole thing futile and not maybe worth doing in the first place. I've always said this, like marketing is hard because like to when you have to do like the most logical thing that won't get you fired.

33:18sometimes when most organizations it's like i if i know i'm going to invest in this and so i know other people are investing this and i could prove because i could say these 10 or 100 or 1000 brands are also doing it it's like not but if i'm doing something really out of the box like how do i defend that and that's where the fear comes and it's like the risk to reward is like i either I go 10x in this campaign or I get fired. That's more fun though, right? I mean, I love the risk of the campaigns because I think some people have that fear of nobody buys IBM type. Nobody gets fired by buying IBM mentality.

34:03I really hate that though. I'm writing a second book at the moment and I'm talking about that a lot. that I feel like marketers have this constant need to prove their worth every two minutes and to reassure everyone that they're worth having around and that their work is worthwhile. And I hate it. I just think it's like, it's almost like a bit of an inferiority complex. And I think as marketers, we kind of need to, and not just marketers, but the people managing marketers. I think we need to like let people be creative a little bit more, try things and sort of be willing to get back to it being more of an art form rather than just make ultra-safe, low-risk decisions all the time that spit out vanilla, beige content that doesn't get anyone in trouble but doesn't really do anything either.

34:53I'm a big believer that in marketing, the enemy is indifference, not backlash. If someone doesn't dislike what you're doing, you're probably not being edgy enough. if you're probably not pushing it as far as you should. I also think it comes down to how we incentivize marketing. I think like incentivizing with a salary and nothing more than that, it's like people are just going to come to work every day on the salary and they don't want to lose a salary. But if you incentivize like targets and you incentivize like growth and you incentivize if we went, if we grew revenue 2x, like you get x, like I think it becomes more of like a risk-taking thing because it's just like betting on a stock or like you know if you that stock goes 20x like you will get paid out whatever is a stock worth two one two three percent but in marketing you bet on the stock you still get the same salary maybe you get your 10 bonus but you don't get anything more than that so yeah I think sometimes it comes down to an incentive thing internally and some people just don't want to lose a salary and they rather just be safe instead of or it becomes it's a mentality like you said before it's like mentality of a team it's like do you celebrate risks do you celebrate creativity do you like or do you like disincentivize and also like punish them like when people do take a risk and it goes out of whack culture yeah exactly lossy i asked everybody in this podcast but what is a marketing hill you would die on i feel like we've covered quite a few of the hills that i i'm willing to die on but yeah i think if i have to be really obvious about it is that people belong at the center of marketing and that we can't lose that we shouldn't allow customers to become data points in spreadsheets, we shouldn't allow staff members to be blinkered and told not to say things and not to have opinions and to be themselves.

37:01And let's keep people at the heart of what we're doing here. Cause marketing is just one group of people trying to demonstrate value to another group of people. I feel like we've lost that along the way. Yeah. I, it's funny cause I think it always happens when we figure out things to like game the system a little bit that other people aren't doing and then we start gaming the system and then the system catches up and everybody gets an even playing field again and then that's that's what happened with targeting with marketing it's like people who were good at targeting and understood how to target at a deep level one until it targeting just became like table stakes and then now creative is like the targeting and now like ai is becoming like a people who are using ai in the right ways are moving ahead of people but then when it starts becoming flattening it becomes the humans it always becomes the humans that the creativity and humans and taste that went out once technology becomes a little bit of flattening i think that's The thing is like underneath all of it is people and that's always going to be the case.

38:15So we can't lose track of that. Well, thank you so much for joining and everybody go buy Phil's book, Human First Marketing. Like you said, we need more of that. And if you need to defend this internally, the book will help you. And also why you should be doing it because it is everybody should be thinking about it. So thank you so much for coming on. Thanks, Daniel. It's been a pleasure. Thanks so much for listening. Keep tuning in to hear more great insights from the coolest marketers from around the world. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe and follow the Marketing Millennials podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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