2405 - Reimagining News Through AI and Visual Storytelling with Craig Harris' LookatMedia

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0:46Visit podverify.com if you'd like to be featured as a future guest. I'm Josh Elledge. Let's get into it. With us right now, Craig Harris. Craig, you are the founder of LookAtMedia. You're found on the web at lookatmedia.co. Can't wait to talk about that. Craig, thank you for joining us. And thank you for the invitation. And also thank you to your listeners as well. Yes, of course. Craig, I didn't warn you about this. So hopefully you got something ready to go. But one thing I love doing before, you know, as we talk with leaders around the world, I always love finding out what great business founders and leaders tend to be very multi-passionate.

1:29A lot of us have hobbies. We're into stuff. We geek out on things. I didn't warn you about this, but I don't know if you've got any hobbies, movies, TV shows, games, music, anything you are currently really into right now. What are you into? Aside from work, it cannot be work-related. No, this kind of is a bit of both, believe it or not. It started back when I was about 10 years old. Two things happened. This is back in 74 in Australia. We had a new prime minister elected and in two weeks he changed the entire Australian system. So what you see as Australia today was done in two weeks by one man.

2:13So that introduced me to politics and the power of what an individual could do. And also communications. We saw something very different in that election. We saw people respond in a very different way. And it changed the nature of who we were as a people. So as a 10-year-old, that really got my attention. In the same year, my mother bought the entire set of world book encyclopedias. and that started two passions. So these passions interject with each other. So it made me an information junkie. So I sat down that summer and read all the encyclopedias from start to finish and I can pretty much remember most of it to this day.

2:54So I've taken what I saw at that point in my life and it's fueled this ongoing passion of being an information junkie but also trying to understand the nature of human beings, what moves them, what makes them think, what makes them change the way that they see the world. And I don't have a particular hobby, but what I'm always doing is seeking information and wanting to know exactly how the world works. So curiosity is my passion and it's my hobby as well. Well, really great timing, given I think a lot of global events and with AI impersonating, and, you know, you, you know, separating truth from fiction, I think is going to become a more and more valuable skill.

3:41I think propaganda has absolutely caused a lot of chaos. I mean, it always has to have been a kind. But right now, I think, you know, in social media, unfortunately, is just fan the flames of a lot of stuff that you geek out on. yes so this has got to be an interesting laboratory of where we are right now yeah it is and the interesting thing is that whether we're talking politics or whether we're talking business or missions around climate change or so on we're doing a lot of work right across the board in all of those areas because every single sector is faced with this problem where you have how do you separate AI from fact and there's AI slop out there.

4:29Now in the in the news space they call it pink slime in the US. So there's all these fake news outlets starting to pop up across America which are pushing these really disruptive narratives and so that impacts everyone. It's not just the political cycles, it's how people perceive the world. So our technology is not just a technology to help people get more earned media coverage. It's a tool that's set up to help journalists know that they're getting factual information every single time. So that's been our mission from day one. So whereas other PR software has always been set up to just push out the message, but we've built something that crafts the message and it does it in such a way that firstly it helps the journalists and helping the journalists, It helps our clients get their messaging out.

5:21And what it also does that other technology doesn't do is it focuses on the visual narrative. We figured this out about six or seven years ago. We saw the demise of news at the same time as social media was climbing. We looked at it, and this is where the curiosity comes in, and we saw that what the big difference was was the visual narratives. so the news couldn't keep up with the quality and quantity of the visual content so we incorporated that back in and created these newsroom environments where journalists could go in 24 7 and get visuals to create their own visual narratives and when they do that they get a lot more readership and that helps restore people's faith in news and make it it's partially entertainment you've got to make it visually exciting for people and 600 words and a tiny an image at the top is just not engaging people anymore.

6:14So it's important that you get that sort of strike that balance. And so what we've done is focus on that. All right. Because you didn't talk about baking bread or something that distinct from your professional work, we kind of really seamlessly kind of segued into the work that you do. We need to take a step back here and set some definitions here. You talked about a media center. So we're talking to a room of business founders, very busy, obviously, you know, getting positive press, being talked about, being part of the conversation, building an audience. These are all valuable things that we want.

6:56How does a media center that you're talking about, maybe define that for folks? Are we talking about a press kit or what is it this exactly okay so when you let's say for example you go to any organization and on their website they'll have news and they'll have posts about what's happening in their organization but it's not properly up kept when you go to something like apple apple has their own news room as well but they have a team of people managing it but what they're doing is they're writing stories they're putting visual content in there and they're trying to get media coverage now even an organization like Apple does this really badly.

7:37In fact, there's less than 1 % of these newsrooms around the planet that actually do the job properly. I won't go into the technical reasons why, but they're not compliant with journalists' needs. So what we've set out to do is build an environment where journalists can come to what looks like an illustrated magazine on your organisation, download stories, get access to the visual assets they need to illustrate those stories without even talking to you as a person. Now the benefit of that is it means that you don't have to have an in-house PR team to manage this. PR is incredibly expensive. It's very hit and miss.

8:17When you get it right, it's magical. But if you don't manage your message and it's getting harder with AI to get around those fake narratives, those fake visuals. If you don't have a technology that helps you with crisis management as well, you're leaving your business exposed. Now, a great bit of media coverage can skyrocket the value of your business and how much revenue you can generate. Some bad media coverage can bury you overnight. So whereas this used to be something that large organisation is focused on. We build a technology that the 15 million companies around the world who've never been able to afford or understand PR can now get onto and use and learn how to do it in five minutes and do it at a very high professional level.

9:04So that's been our mission to almost democratise that. Now that helps news as well. So if journalists can get more good quality stories and more good sources, they can verify it. Then all of a sudden we're not going to have the same stories over and over again in the media cycle which we have today. News has become very dull because they have to do it low cost so we hear the same thing 40, 50 times a day and we hear it across all the channels. The idea is if we can actually get and we're particularly focused on local news because local news still has the trust that people depend on. It helps connect them with their communities and our technology allows that to actually happen.

9:46That's interesting. So what you're describing, it's kind of somewhere between a blog and a media kit, right? So it's a, and I can say this, you know, as a journalist, so I've been a journalist since the 90s, I've been writing a syndicated newspaper column since 2008, you know, 11 newspapers. And my, so I have a partner, One of my team members helps with a lot of research and gathering stuff. But I got to tell you, I do very little talking to experts. I mean, I really rely on being able to, you know, maybe go to a government website and get statistics and, you know, gather stuff. I don't have time to schedule interviews.

10:29So if I find a source that is reputable, they're committed to facts and not pink slime. It really makes my job easier. And of course, as a professional, I'm always going to cite my source. And what's nice about Craig, what you explained is, you know, that source for me, like they created it one time. And, you know, now it just kind of feeds them forever. Now, I also have to point this out, and I'm sure I'm going to ask you about this. If we look at best practice for GEO and for informing AI, which, you know, if we were to fast forward five years from now, how much of your business do you think you're going to be getting from SEO versus how much of your business are you going to be getting from an AI solution?

11:24I think we all know what the answer to that is. It ain't going to be a whole lot of SEO. That's the old way of doing things. And just reading an article about this yesterday, what you do is absolutely best practice for informing AI when they update their training models so that they can reference you in those AI answers. Tell me all about that. And maybe I'm wrong about that. That's what I was doing yesterday. No, you're absolutely right. In fact, it's going to be more immediate. The Reuters Institute put out a report just a couple of weeks ago. They're predicting by the end of this year, 30 % of news is going to be consumed through live language models.

12:09So people will go and ask a question about the news. Now, let's say, for example, we're talking about a political campaign. Rather than necessarily going and doing a search online, somebody will type in, like, who is this candidate? What do they stand for? How do they respond to these issues or whatever? and whatever they're getting off large language models will inform their beliefs and their opinions. It's a bit like that world book encyclopedia thing that I did when I was 10. This becomes a trusted source of information that people now are depending on more and more. So with our media center, with our entire technology suite, it's designed for GEO optimization.

12:48But there's also something quite magical in something that we've done here. we've created our own language model which has an error rate which is less than 0.01 percent now if you compare that to chat tpt and so on which is probably 15 to 20 percent we have one of the lowest rates of of errors in fact we've never had one we put that in for legal purposes now why that's important is if you're doing pr and you've got someone who doesn't know how to do this stuff. We help you do it really, really quickly. You become an expert in it. When we say five minutes, we're not exaggerating. It's that fast.

13:28We'll find exactly the right journalists. We'll write the press release for you. Then we'll create the article, all the social media stuff, and you can keep doing this. So it becomes one of the most cost-effective ways of getting out there and talking to people. Never before has a business, say, that's under$2 million a year in revenue been able to have PR capabilities anywhere like this, let alone have something this professional and access to a global media database. It's something like 180 ,000 journalists just in the US. So you can start talking to these people pretty much as soon as you sign up.

14:06So we're trying to be really sort of egalitarian or democratize the whole concept of PR because it's always been an elusive thing that the most valuable organizations can afford and when we're talking about tech all the big tech bros that we hear in the news they got to where they are through PR they'll all tell you they spent no money on advertising but when you look at the size of their PR teams they're enormous they've done all their work through PR so even a small organization can benefit from PR, but it was too cost prohibitive before our technology for them to actually get into that space.

14:46You needed staff internally who knew how to do it, but the technology itself was really, really expensive. Yeah. Craig, fascinating topic. I wish we had more time because I have way more questions. We'll have to talk about that offline. Now, Craig Harris, again, your website, lookatmedia.co. When somebody goes to your website, What would you recommend they do? I would recommend that they set up a demo. The first thing to do is to do that because once you see this, nothing beats a conversation more than actually saying, here's a couple of notes about your organization. Here's how it goes through the workflow.

15:28After five minutes, you'll look at it and go, wow, that's incredible. I can actually do this. We want to empower people to do something they've never been able to reach for before. And that demo will really demonstrate very quickly that this is within reach. And from that, we find that people then want to move on to the next level sign up and get moving with it. There's usually very little friction once they see the technology. We've kept it all under wraps until very recently because we didn't want our competitors to know exactly what we're doing because it's probably two to three years ahead than anything else in our space at the moment.

16:10Very cool. Craig Harris, you're a tech founder, the founder of LookAtMedia, your website, lookatmedia.co. Craig, thank you for joining us. Thank you, Josh. I'd love to do this again sometime.

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