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"What if we Could?" A podcast exploring this question that drive us. We explore the practical application of artificial intelligence, product design, blockchain & AR/VR, and tech alpha in the service of humans.
David DeVore (00:01.267)
Hey, what's up? This is David DeVore with MeshMesh. And this is the What If We Could Show, where basically every week we sort of ask the question, well, what if we could? We unpack deep problems that are waiting to be solved in the world of AI and autonomous innovation. And with me here today is Bob Ulry and Kevin Neust, partners, MeshMesh. So what we're going to talk about today is we're going to talk about content atomization, this idea.
of taking a single piece of content and making it into many forms of content, many pieces of media, many channels, many personas. And what that really looks like and what is possible with the world of AI that we're starting to move into. And so, where I want to start is probably, gosh, I think that it's probably 10 years ago and where I...
first became interested in this concept of content atomization was I was running a small startup and I was following Jay Baer who was at that time doing a lot with Exact Target and really he was, if you know Jay Baer, he's a social media consultant primarily and what he was doing was he was every day.
recording a short three minute video. He would send that video off to his team. And from that one video, his team would produce a long form blog post, a short form blog post, a number of tweets. They would produce of course a short video or a couple of shorts for YouTube and for, and I think for Vimeo at that time, I don't think Instagram was up yet.
or certainly not TikTok. And it was amazing from the perspective of like a single solopreneur being able to take three minutes a day and stretch that three minutes out into all these really interesting channels and pieces of content. And for, you know, what we know is that content is king. And we also know that it is incredibly
David DeVore (02:26.615)
difficult, time consuming and bottlenecked to produce content for lots of reasons for brands. And part of the reason of course is brand integrity. The other is just people, right? So at that time, we don't have the LLM tools and stable diffusion tools and integrations that we do today.
And so there was no other option but for it to be a manual process, right? And so it took probably a number of different from a designer being involved to a copywriter being involved to a video editor being involved. You think about the number of people that on Jay's team that sort of had to touch this in order to get it to an end state, to get it published and finalized. You know, it was, it was a fair amount of heavy lifting and, um, certainly,
David DeVore (03:28.236)
certainly more efficient than producing every piece of content from scratch along the way, but at the same time was still pretty people heavy. Well, so today, now we've got the tools where we can actually remove people from this equation. And so at MeshMesh, we've been thinking a lot about that. We've been really beating that concept up, partly to scratch our own itch, but also as we sort of got deeper and deeper into it,
I'm thinking, gosh, if this is valuable to us, and could we actually in our small little startup team, atomize content at scale across all of our assorted channels that is, you know, has to be high quality. It has to be interesting. It has to be personalized. You know, there's these expectations exist for, for really what makes good content. If we can scratch our own itch and make that reality real for ourselves, then,
There's probably other people in the world that would love to have this magic happen for them as well. So I really want to just start there and I would love to sort of just hear from you, Bob. First of all, like what, like the evolution that we've taken around this concept of content atomization and now also what we're calling atomic content.
Bob Ullery (04:36.238)
Thanks for watching!
David DeVore (04:48.819)
You know, what is what's been awesome to see what's been sort of the places where we're getting hung up, where the you know, sort of the good, the bad, the ugly that and challenges along the way that we're running into.
Bob Ullery (05:02.526)
Yeah. And I've had some great conversations lately too, where, you know, early on, call it weeks or months ago, the, the concept was still kind of heady as people sort of thought about just AI in generally, um, and was introduced to it and started to use it and play around with it. Um, the reception of what we're putting out is now starting to click like people, Oh, okay. I get what you're doing here. You're able to do more in parallel. You're able to.
essentially 10 X plus X yourself and get rid of a lot of the menial tasking within something you're trying to do. Right. One of the ways to frame that up lately in some of these conversations is this notion of non-deterministic execution. In the previous world, we sort of had to automate all kinds of stuff like the advent of SaaS and software in general. That was kind of the payoff. Like, hey, let's automate some of this stuff.
manually doing every single click as humans. But turns out there's a ceiling there, there's a plateau, right? Like you need to know what are all of the automations you wanna accomplish and what are every single step involved with those. Somebody's gotta build them, right? So you see orgs make massive investments in things for process automation in any marketing or ops or whatever it is. And they're spending a ton of money.
millions of dollars at the end of that road and journey, there's like 10 automations running in their brand new Shania SaaS account. And so I think the reality is different than the vision always. And so that's kind of the big good that's coming out of the last few weeks is like, maybe not. Maybe the reality is catching up to the vision here really, really rapidly. And the way to do that is non-deterministic execution.
David DeVore (06:55.442)
Mm-hmm.
Bob Ullery (06:59.286)
Like, can we remove that requirement of knowing what the steps are to accomplish something and let these agents sort of figure it out, um, you know, on their own through iteration. So that's, um, that's part of it. Um, on the bad side, you know, this, it's a new novel concept and there's not a lot of tooling out there to do it, which is an opportunity, you know, I think a lot of folks are running into a new space and thinking about picks and shovels.
David DeVore (07:04.479)
Hmm.
Bob Ullery (07:27.798)
They don't know necessarily what they're gonna mine with those picks and shovels yet. And so there's not a lot of picks and shovels to choose from off the shelf, which both, it's very exciting and it's fun, it's creative. So that's our opportunity is try to figure out and build that new novel ways to execute old ideas, but in order to harness the new sets of technologies. That's really what we've been doing the last few weeks and it's come along really nicely. Current technical, you know,
David DeVore (07:31.072)
Mm.
Bob Ullery (07:57.746)
headwinds more than blockers or challenges, I guess, is moving from, from POC to let's call it small audience scale, you know, right now we're kind of moving fast and hunting interesting ideas. And so sort of reasoning about like, how do we take those new concepts and create a reusable framework that we can like throw those things in and still have it run. Think about these things more generically.
David DeVore (08:23.959)
Uh huh.
Bob Ullery (08:26.018)
Kind of a brain dump. I don't know if that's helpful, but.
Kevin Nuest (08:30.523)
I mean to talk about some of those.
The types of use cases that some of the prospective clients, uh, want to do with it is we've been talking about the, the vision part, right? Bob, the is, it's been a wide range and that deterministic part is going to be very, very critical to allow us to support all those things, everything from one, one brand saying, Hey, we need to light up. Tick-tock and short form content in 2024, not in, not in 2024 in January, 2024. Right.
It's, uh, it's where our customers are. They happen to be B2B, but they act like B2C. So we got to talk to them where they're spending their time and they, you know, tried working with an agency. They tried working with some influencers. They really didn't get much out the door that the time to get there. The cost was super high to get like one post done, right? They can't run a brand off of one post in one video. They need multiple pieces of content every single day. Right.
So that was, that was one use case just at the brand level. And another is a team, uh, account based management. So they have inbound, uh, leads, they have a sales team and just like every sales team, there's, you know, the 80 20 rule. You've got the top 20% or your strategic that you're, you're chasing. They have account reps assigned to them. They're crafting these emails. They're super specific and, and that will resonate. We'll help that. Um,
that prospect understand the value, move down the funnel. But in aggregate, that other 20% of those leads, while they are smaller, uh, are still super valuable if they can capture them efficiently. And so to be able to apply a very similar automation and, uh, make it feel like every communication to that other 80% long tail feels like it came from a strategic feels like, uh, and understands their business.
Kevin Nuest (10:26.262)
And shows them the path of how to get the value out of it for their specific business. That's that's huge, right? That's, that's a ton of, ton of additional revenue, um, captured at a, at a profitable way. So those are just a couple of those, those use cases. Um, Dave, I don't know if you want me to talk about the, uh, the, the top down messaging like aspect as well, I think is, is a really interesting one of how do you push messages down and through from.
What's the, what's the focus or what's the initiative or what's the thought of the day we kind of called it.
David DeVore (10:57.601)
Yeah.
David DeVore (11:00.891)
Yeah, I mean, one of the things that's interesting, right, and it's, I think it's hard sometimes to wrap your head around because, you know, everybody sort of lives in their own. If they do content, if they're into marketing, right, they're living in typically, you know, channels, processes, and brand voice.
right? Those things come together and then and then a schedule, right? Like those things come together, then to produce content. And there's really two types of content, especially on a B2B level, that I think are really interesting, right? There's brand content, it's you know, hey, what is the what comes from? What comes from the brand to their YouTube channel or to their
brand TikTok or whatnot, then there is content that's user generated, right? Um, which is of course, other people talking about your brand. And then there's a third piece of content that's interesting, um, that we, that that's a lot of times sort of, um, between the cracks, right? And what that content is, is that is, uh, let's say, um, let's say representative to customers.
Right. So, um, that could be an account manager. That could be a sales rep. That could be a customer success rep. Um, but anytime I send somebody documentation on how to do something or anytime I answer a question or anytime I, um, am intersecting with my, my accounts. Um, in, even if it's just a plain text email that is also content.
Right. That is representative of, of the brand. It's representative of what the brand is trying to sell. Um, or, uh, or, or opportunities that the customer may have or whatnot. And so one of the opportunities that we've heard over and over again, especially around sort of account-based marketing. You know, if you have a message from the top, from sort of the, the executive office, say from the brand marketers.
David DeVore (13:18.547)
Let's say it's a special for the week, or let's say that it is a discount, or let's say that it's, oh, here's the type of accounts that we need to upgrade this year in a specific matter or here's the type of accounts that are perfect for this type of feature. That communication down through an organization and then getting people to actually write their own content or create their own content that actually...
matches what the brand is trying to put out is really, it can be a really challenging. So one of the things that we've been hearing from organizations is is, hey, could you actually per, you know, use atomized content to, to produce from the executive office, whole bunches of content that gets pushed down to specific reps.
or specific account managers or specific salespeople or customer success or whatnot, that then they have handy to pull out and slap into their one-to-one coms across their customers. And so that's a really interesting use case, right? Especially at enterprise brands, enterprise software and so forth, is basically producing content at scale that then
individual reps can, can use and pull out and potentially also is in their own persona. Right. So it's not necessarily a message from the brand. It's a message from, you know, me, Dave Dvor to my accounts conformed to the brand voice and on the brand topic. Um, and what we know is that, you know, if, uh, if people have to create content from scratch, they're.
far less likely to do it than if it's like, yeah, hey, cut and paste this or hey, it just shows up and I can send it, right? And so we think that's a really fun and interesting opportunity and something that we've not really seen at scale in B2B account-based marketing or otherwise.
Kevin Nuest (15:18.654)
Mm-hmm.
Kevin Nuest (15:34.306)
And ideally beyond copy pasta, like you're talking about, right. Is that it's a, Hey, here's, here's the new product that we're releasing and here's the messaging on it. Uh, now if that can be transformed automatically into the Dave DeVore persona of how Dave DeVore talks to his, uh, clients that he's responsible for as the growth manager for them. And also automatically contextualizes that product for his.
David DeVore (15:57.909)
Right.
Kevin Nuest (16:03.454)
clients as well, just like they would expect to receive a one to one message from, from Dave, what the, so what, why does this matter to me? Right. There's a general value prop of what that product, that new product does, but how do you make it super specific to where the adoption is a hundred percent then by the person you're talking to you, because they go, Oh, got it. This is exactly how to get the value. And the time to value, uh, is dramatically shrunk. I understand doing it done valuable either more revenue for the company.
stickier customer, right? More value for the customer themselves. So that's the, that's the power and why. A organization assigns a growth manager and account manager, customer success to clients is exactly that reason. Uh, and imagine being able to have a superpower of doing that at a hundred X scale instead of, you know, one X, right?
David DeVore (16:54.551)
For, yeah, 100%. I mean, I think the other challenge, right? So the pressure on this is going to be, and I think that this is gonna be, it's gonna be interesting as, the world was already flooded with content, right? I mean, and this is only gonna speed up, right? And there's going to be, what we know in terms of sort of supply and demand is that as
you know, content becomes commoditized that there's also going to be pressure for more and more quality in the mix. Right. And there's certainly going to be a lot of content that, that gets, you know, spit out on the internet that is obviously AI and it obviously just sucks, right. And you're just like, and the reality is, is that brands
that and brands know this right brands know that they are going to lose reputation if the quality sucks like their customers are going to see it and they're gonna go Oh, yuck Nike right? So Nike, you know, they're not going to put anything out they won't put anything out that isn't like sort of the peak of quality and I think that that's also going to is really important as we think about how we address content atomization and atomic content is like
Um, how does quality persist? Like what drives quality? How is quality built into the model? Um, and. And how is persona built into the model? And so I, we've done some really fun stuff in that regard. And I love, you know, Bob, like w what, how are we creating personas? Like, how are we, um, how are we defining content and putting guard rails in terms of quality, um, around.
around all those sorts of personas, tone of voice, brand voice, all that sort of stuff.
Bob Ullery (18:56.31)
Yeah, I mean, I think the ultimate backstop is human in the loop and we're adhering to that, right? Ultimately who gets the final say of what's quality. So QA layers on top before execution. And that's important, you know, part, part of the reason I think so is recent conversations with, um, a marketing SI org. Um, so systems integrator and there are folks that stand up, you know, marketing SaaS for, for folks. And.
You know, they're thinking like, well, how do we, how do we scale this people business, right? Traditionally, people businesses scale the hierarchy, right? Add more branches to the tree, make it deeper and wider. And, uh, but when you think about a service business like that, that's a challenge because that's an incredibly expensive proposition. Um, so long as you've got the capital, uh, inflow, obviously to fund that. But what if, you know, even though we're thinking everything
uh, in the future is hierarchy. It's sort of interesting that it doesn't actually adhere to how old orgs use the scale in that sort of hierarchical way. What we'll see likely is that orgs scale horizontally, right? This notion of 50 X, 100 Xing people. This was exciting to the SIs in the sense that like, Hey, you know, if you want to create value and growth for the biz, what if you don't need to create a super massively deep.
tree of resources and people in your org, what if you can 50 x 100 x these folks and to sort of scale them horizontally in a sense, there's like 50 Bobs and 50 Dave's and 50 Kevin's, just doing more work more efficiently with higher quality. And out of that, you know, a couple things came to mind in terms of like what levers to focus on if you were going to try and try and actually execute this new world and scale your business that way. You know, they are really deep in email.
as kind of the primary driver of that biz and the services they do. So will it increase engagement? Probably, we think so, right? It is more personalized, it is more organic. The persona is almost a parlor trick though, right? Like it is really cool that we can do a real time avatar of Dave and he can deliver that message to you in his tone of voice. That's probably important. There's likely measurable value there, we think. Clearly better than.
David DeVore (21:17.772)
Mm.
Bob Ullery (21:19.818)
a text only email, like it's going to get more lift. But we know, we know that we can make the process more efficient. We know that for sure. So bottom line cost savings and ability to drive that scale because it's, you know, removing a ton of burn in terms of the calories associated to do an execution end to end, and that's where that X-ing comes in. So can we accelerate? Yeah. Accelerate the growth in that way.
David DeVore (21:28.98)
Mm.
Bob Ullery (21:47.266)
Can we proliferate the messages? Yes. Atomization proliferates variations of messages out in different niches around social media or internet or whatever, sort of landing those for niche audiences that take different paths to find that stuff, right? Line of that. And then, can we highly personalize it? Yes. And because we can kind of see that as a loop, because we're able to do those subsequent steps, it of course will drive higher engagement, right?
And I kind of think of this in two ways. And you were talking about it earlier, like this top down approach. Uh, you know, the ABM model, the CEO has a daily note or a concept. There's new product announcement. There's new something going on. And you sort of reatomize that down the hierarchy of the org CEO to, uh, a C something, oh, to the EVP in their org, to their AVPs, to their VPs, to their BDMs, to AEs, et cetera, down the tree.
And that's all in an effort to reorient that content, to match their peers that they're going to be sending that message to, right? Ultimately with a goal of creating a bunch of value for them, right? It's not just like, here's an announcement, we should get on a call and talk about how we might think about applying this to your business and maybe find some value and create Lyft. What, no, what if we could take that sort of heady concept at the brand level and tell them exactly at the individual...
level at their role or team level, and then ultimately at their org level, what are those value props and why does it matter to what they're doing based on the account data and stuff that we know about them? The other just interesting thought is, you know, we think top down, but what if this actually happens bottom up as well? So if you start at that sender peer recipient level, Bob sending something to Dave,
David DeVore (23:26.945)
Yeah.
Bob Ullery (23:40.77)
Bob has solution sort of background, Dave marketing. I'm going to talk about this differently to Dave. What if I bubbled up that core concept up to the team value prop level and then ultimately zoom out even further, Dave, of what we just talked about. This is why it matters at the brand level instead of the inverse, like trying to filter it down. What if you could filter it out?
David DeVore (23:58.332)
Hmm.
David DeVore (24:02.127)
Yeah, for sure. I mean, one of the things that I'm super excited about, you know, generally brand content sucks. It's pretty boring. It's...
you know, tends to be the same banners over and over and the same, you know, like buzzword bingo, you know, of, of copy and whatnot. And one of the things that I'm super excited about, and I think brands are realizing like they are needing they're getting to a place where they're being forced. I think part of it is driven by, you know, new consumers, digital natives, Gen Z, Gen Alpha.
where to it and they're, you know, watching the growth of people being engaged in something like Roblox and so forth. And so I think that brands are going to be really stretching to do more interesting content at scale. And and I think that it is whether that's more interesting band, you know, that's more interesting, bright banners, you know, that that, you know,
I would love to see, you know, I would love to see any number of, you know, fairly boring, you know, financial services brands like come out with something interesting, right? Something that is like scroll stopping. And I think AI is starts to get to a place where that can be done. But it can also be done at scale, that every single thing that I ever see from the brand is always new.
Right? It's never, it's, it's always a, a slightly different and engaging experience rather than just the same thing I've seen 15 times before. Um, so I'm super interested to see how that starts shaping up. Um, and I'm also super interested to see where, how AI like AI video to the 2024 is going to be the year of AI video a hundred percent. And if you know,
David DeVore (26:04.559)
anybody who's not checked out like runway dot I think it's runway dot TV um it where they are literally there are filmmakers you know building um building video full you know full uh experience video experiences with runway and stable fusion and mid journey and bringing all these things together and then we've got you know we've got hey Jen
Um, we've got, uh, we've got Leonardo, we've got so many creative tools starting to, um, bubble up to make experiences that we've never seen or been able to build before, um, is it move.ai which I'm, which I just downloaded. I'm getting ready to, um, you know, film myself as a Sasquatch or something. Um, it's going to be, it's going to be awesome. Like, is it going to be, it's going to be like.
next level over the next over the next year watching all of these creative tools really start to hit the scene and how people are going to use them. Pika. Yep.
Bob Ullery (27:09.398)
You know what's it? Pizza.
Kevin Nuest (27:09.546)
Pika, Pika labs, right. Another one. I think that it's, it's really, it's really funny reflecting back. Let's go rewind a year ago, quick little timeline, uh, called a year ago. Uh, effectively chat GPT as we know it comes on the scene and now LLMs are on the scene, right? Amazing text driven content being generated blows people's minds. The first thing they say is yeah, but it'll never do images fast forward six months, right?
Uh, both, both Dolly and mid journey, uh, are producing awesome stuff by the end of, you know, this last year, you know, call it 12 months. It's it's amazing. And those same people that six month Mark, when they started seeing images come out, they go, yeah, but AI will never produce video. I don't think people realize the video is just 30 images a second. That's all that is. It's just a matter of computation. It's right. And so here we are.
And 2024 market Dave, Dave called the shot. Absolutely the year of AI video. And it's, it's going to get real weird and real fun. Right.
Bob Ullery (28:18.634)
We're already at a hundred frames a second right now. Like literally stable diffusion video came out what? I don't know. A month ago, give or take in its current form. A hundred frames a second with the right infrastructure. That's insane. That's real time HD, better than 4K, 4K 60 frames per second. This is almost 2X that. So it is exciting, right? And it probably, so back to your kind of pointer on ads, like bring those two worlds together, Dave.
David DeVore (28:19.023)
It is. Yeah.
Bob Ullery (28:48.85)
Historically, it was about it was about velocity of ad timing and the closest the closest mapping of relationship you could you could find based on the context that you knew about to show the right ad but the ad, it was so important that ad rendered really fast, really, really fast. And we're kind of conditioned to think ads are like the top of the pyramid when it comes to velocity of execution, right?
I'm not so sure that holds going forward, right? Part of that was about just frequency, like law of large numbers. We throw X ads out there with a end percent click through and per conversion rate, we can forecast X dollars in revenue and that makes a lot of sense. But in the age of AI at scale, it's actually much more intentional what you're gonna receive as a consumer, right? It's not just banners that are categorical or brand related.
What if the way we consume ads going forward, ads are delayed on purpose, right? So you land on a piece of content, whoever wrote it and you're reading it, that ad should probably incorporate the content you're reading into it's called the action is value props, the things that's trying to tell you and connect those dots. We can never do that before. Never do that for it's all segment based. It was second, third party data based on clicks and
David DeVore (30:04.366)
Hmm.
David DeVore (30:08.235)
100%.
Bob Ullery (30:13.762)
Traffic, right? Traffic doesn't describe a person literally whatsoever. Not at all, right? It's the best signal that we had at the time. The best signal we have now is what you are currently doing right now. And then can we form value around that and drive you someplace that aligns that.
David DeVore (30:14.903)
Mm-hmm.
David DeVore (30:35.663)
100% I don't know. There's this great scene in Blade Runner, like the newer Blade Runner where he like walks out walks out of his apartment or whatever out on the street and there's a there's a billboard of a woman in bikini or whatever and she's like, you know, you know, Hey, Kevin, you know, and like it is clearly like it is clearly like that that's where we're going like is just tuned into like who you are where you're at.
what you're doing at that time. Um, and what is most likely to capture your, uh, your attention. Right. Um, and it's like, I mean, we've been, I mean, we've been doing this sort of personalized marketing, you know, customer journey stuff for, for a long, long time. Um, but it was always sort of a, it was always just sort of like.
a first name merge field or like for you know, account number merge field or like, you know, some sort of like merge of data. It really was never truly contextual to where you're at and what you were doing, right. And so it'll be exciting to be exciting to see how AI it just like the whole world of like customer journey is going to get turned upside down. As as now we can do stuff.
in real time that's never been done before.
Kevin Nuest (31:59.398)
And Bob, when it was made contextual in the past, the, I've helped a lot of teams market a lot of products. And what that looked like previously was working really closely with, or being the publisher of said content or experience, and then working with the brand and doing a deep brand integration, uh, teeing up exactly what that looks like, getting their, their creative agency involved.
doing a one to six month like sponsorship buyout of, of some experience. Right. And now that point, then the content, the ad was contextual to the content. We're talking about real time and every single piece of content that you're, you're consuming. Right. You're, you're watching the Mr. Beast video and that, that mid roll ad should reference the video that you're watching in the first half of the video, not even the second half. Right.
David DeVore (32:42.772)
That's right.
Kevin Nuest (32:53.33)
That that's what it should be. It should feel like a native integrated experience. And I wanted to throw this back to you, Dave, this, this question of. Quality of I'll expand it to getting attention in 2024. Right? So quality is like one thing wrap up on brand in there, for example, but it doesn't really matter if a piece of content's on brand, if nobody wants to pay attention to it, so like what, what does attention seeking, getting look like in 2024?
David DeVore (33:16.425)
Right.
Kevin Nuest (33:23.102)
Like what should brands be doing?
David DeVore (33:26.011)
Yeah, I mean, it's, it's hard. I mean, at the same time we're talking about, you know, real time ads, ads are in tough, a tough spot these days. I mean, like the, you know, I mean, you know, ads, um, they are upside down in terms of what they cost to acquire a customer more often than not. Um, they are, you know, with ad blockers, the death of cookies and, uh, and, um, and
Kevin Nuest (33:34.314)
Mm-hmm.
David DeVore (33:54.803)
you know, just general banner blindness there, then they're not working very well. I would I probably, you know, I might build by a very specific ad for, you know, really as a test for something or to target a very specific group. But generally, like they're not a great return on investment. So I mean, I think what we're gonna, what we're seeing is we're seeing brands getting really creative about around experiences, right? So that's why you've got brands, you know, jumping into Roblox.
you know, or Fortnite. That's why you've got brands jumping into the vast world of influencers, right? And I think influencers, community building, though, you know, really, you know, amazing wow experiences that are more brand experiences that are, you know, that create moments of like remarkable moments of, moments of virality and moments of
of word of mouth, I think that's really what we're gonna see. And I think AI is gonna play a massive part in it. It's got to, right? It has to, because not only, the internet is moving too fast not to have, you can't spend a week creating a blog post in the perfect video anymore. It's got, it has to...
Kevin Nuest (35:02.186)
has to.
David DeVore (35:22.611)
move at a pace where content is being cycled out at scale, you know, hourly and daily in order to really, you know, build, you know, the build the attention economy, right? So, it's gonna be it's gonna be. Yeah.
Kevin Nuest (35:40.554)
I think Twitter's a great example of that, right? Of the, the meme of the four to eight hours that's going, that goes around Twitter and meme being used extremely, extremely loosely is like, what is the topic that all of Twitter or a sub segment of it are talking about for the next four to six hours and everybody's writing a little piece of content about it. You can't, you can't get in a meeting on Monday morning and be like, okay, we, we saw the trend happen on Saturday. How do we capitalize on that for our post next week? Right. It's gone.
David DeVore (36:08.791)
It's gone, right? It's gone.
Kevin Nuest (36:09.882)
It's, it's so far over. You come back seven days later, two days later and post your take on something. It'll be like, get out here, get out of here. Boomer. What are you doing?
David DeVore (36:21.324)
Yeah. Yeah, it is happening in, you know, it is happening in minutes. And like, Twitter is a great example, you know, it's like, it is it is there and gone, you know, half an hour, you know, used to be it felt like it used to be a Twitter, we had, you know, a cycle of a couple of hours. Now it feels like it's like a half an hour to an hour cycle. If you get something that's still rolling around even the next the next day, you're super
You're super lucky. But it is it is it is there and gone for sure.
Bob Ullery (36:53.75)
You guys remember the Super Bowl in New Orleans at the Superdome when the lights went out and Oreo put a tweet out with just the cookie and it's like something like Oreos are just as good in the dark, right? They did that within minutes and it became a case study. It's a case study of every major marketing program of every university is the Oreo tweet, right? Just notion of like timeliness. What if...
David DeVore (37:07.424)
Yeah.
David DeVore (37:18.558)
Mm.
Bob Ullery (37:22.806)
Every single brand could just do that on the fly in totally atomic autonomous fashion. That's really the promise here. And where my mind goes is it's not just that these ads are gonna be better, that they're gonna be personalized. It's a paradigm shift. It requires a whole new strategy and a whole new way of thinking of this. Ads and content before were all about, you know, like,
who, what, when, and where. Right, these were breadcrumbs left behind for you to follow, but it's up to you, the consumer, to find your way to the thing we ultimately want you to do. And we were challenged there because we could never really personalize it based on what your needs are, right? You could, but really at the end of the day, that final decision is between a few pieces of pre-created content. So clearly you're not gonna be able to cover every combination of person that's coming through that.
And then the paradigm shift comes in with this new just called content, not even ads, right? It's the why and the how, right? Can never really talk about the why or the how in the old world, because we didn't know you, right? We knew your identifier, we knew maybe some categorical things about you, but I'm not gonna be able to tell you why it's important to you necessarily just thematically. I can't tell you how to do it, because I don't know who you are, how you do stuff today.
David DeVore (38:28.949)
Hmm.
David DeVore (38:43.073)
Mm-hmm.
David DeVore (38:47.932)
Mm-hmm.
Bob Ullery (38:48.214)
And now here comes AI and I think that's the big unlock is the why and the how. And these ads or the content itself aren't breadcrumbs anymore. Like they are the experience. I see a world where you're on espn.com and then to jump into like a really, really personalized, fully onboarded experience about ever leaving ESPN. And it's all about you. Here's what we've got. Here's what's new. It's atomized back to you based on who you are and what we might know about you.
what you might tell us in that experience, right? What you were consuming on the page when you were reading it. And it just becomes super hyper-personalized and it becomes the experience. Like, yeah, you might bounce out to go deeper or maybe even on some sort of like very open-ended journey based on that entry point. But ultimately, it just bring it to you and orienting it to you to that why and the how because now we can do that.
David DeVore (39:39.451)
Yeah, 100%. It's the other thing that's going to become really interesting here is like evergreen content and recycling content of different sorts, but it's the other, which I think you, you've got to talk. You, you start to get to a place where you're also, and maybe it's not when maybe it's not evergreen content as much as evergreen themes, right? That a theme can live a theme inside of a brand organization can live.
evergreen while creating different types of content across different channels for, for months or years. The other, the other piece of it that I think is going to get really interesting is, you know, a website is content, a mobile app is content, right? Um, it's not just ads, a landing page is, is content. Um, and so for the ability for, you know, to build full app experiences or automatically.
right, automatically build an experience in front of a consumer as they travel your website, right, for a visitor, based on how they're traveling your website, and what you know about them. You know, it's like, we used to have personal, you know, personal URLs. And again, it'd be like your first name on the page, right? And it's like now web pages are going to be, um, be able to build, be, be built on the fly, a landing page will be built on the fly for a specific person.
right? Specifically with what they need to know. And the whole, you know, I think that it's going to be really interesting with, you know, at the end of the day, the whole internet is content. It's all just content, HTML, CSS, it's just content, right? And so we're really gonna, we're, I really, we talked a lot about, you know, blockchain being the new internet, but it's like, I think that, you know, AI,
is going to usher in an internet like we've never imagined before in terms of experiences.
Kevin Nuest (41:44.026)
You know how you like, you discover a podcast, a YouTube creator, and you start consuming that content and, and you're just like, wow, this is really great content and you just plug yourself into that community and then you go to like, share it with a friend, share it with Bob, I'll share it with you and, or start talking about it. We spend every day all day together and talking and working have a lot, a lot in common.
And there's, there's content that I consume on a daily regular basis. You've just never seen or heard of, and that's now, right? That's right. Now there's these niches of niches happening that are personalized. We're going to this hyper personalized where these, these communities are going to be even, even smaller, even more tight knit, even more meaningful because there'll be that much content that is super engaging, entertaining to them. So I think it's going to be, it's going to be really interesting also, just from a macro standpoint, when
David DeVore (42:16.359)
Never. Yeah.
Kevin Nuest (42:39.982)
Not everybody is consuming the zeitgeist content. There'll still be those moments that pull us together. And I think that's where those Twitter trends, for example, come together. That people still want to be part of something that's like bigger than the sum of its parts, this larger thing. But at the same time, they want their, then they want to go back into their niche community where they want to, they feel safe, they feel, uh, entertained and connect with. So that's going to be a real weird internet, Dave. Very, very interesting.
David DeVore (43:08.235)
gonna be super, which is, which is kind of fine. Cause the internet sort of sucks. I've always thought like the experience of the internet ever so he goes, gonna laugh ever since flash went away. Um, you know, but
Kevin Nuest (43:23.058)
Come on.
Bob Ullery (43:26.01)
was it that I knew then I just knew it.
Kevin Nuest (43:29.77)
It's over. Peak.
David DeVore (43:30.731)
Flash sites were awesome, man. I mean, JavaScript's way more efficient, but flash sites were still, there's some really dope flash websites back in the day. But, you know, the internet just sort of sucks. Like we, and I'm ready for, I'm ready for just more interesting experiences, you know. We were talking the other day, Bob, about.
Bob Ullery (43:37.804)
Oh yeah.
David DeVore (43:54.519)
VR, like Roblox VR, like the new Roblox VR. And it's like, it's like those that's where the like, people want new experiences, people want like something, you know, that makes them go, wow, that's awesome, as opposed to just like, you know, blah, right. So you know, that's why that all of this store stuff starts to come together. It's gonna be it's gonna be really interesting over the next few years.
Bob Ullery (44:20.662)
You remember when you were a kid, there's probably a store you were just always stoked to go to, you know, like for me, it was like Radio Shack, Best Buy, like wherever the gadgets were, right? Like want to go look at DVDs, video games or whatever. And I found myself the other day on like Wednesday, I've been playing Roblox with my six year old. He's super into it and it's they spending way too much time on it. But I was like, hey, instead of like being the.
David DeVore (44:28.563)
Yeah.
Bob Ullery (44:46.378)
like military dad be like, Hey, put that tablet away. It's like, well, no, I'm going to jump in. I'm making an account. I'm going to be his friend and I'm going to jump in. I'm going to play with them. Right. And we found ourselves in a Walmart experience off this game. They call these games, obbies, no idea what it stands for. My kid doesn't know what it stands for, but every the games in the hobby. And we're in this hobby. And, uh, I'm it's this one where like every second you get
David DeVore (44:57.399)
Mm.
Bob Ullery (45:11.598)
Plus one speed so like every second plays get a little bit faster to the point where like it's so fast you can hardly Play it, but we were playing and I looked to the right and There's this portal this door and it looks really cool. And I was like, hey, let's go in there go in it Huge Walmart winter wonderland, right integrated shopping cart all these virtual products skins add-ons really cool Physic mechanics that I hadn't seen I've only been playing for a couple weeks. I haven't seen it all
But, you know, it had a cool flip you could do off of a high dive. You know, I haven't seen that before. And we spent like 45 minutes in there and I couldn't help but think, does that is Walmart going to become his Radio Shack just because of that experience? Right. Like, Dad, can we go to Walmart? There's this thing I want. Can I go to Walmart to get it? I want to go to Walmart because he thinks Walmart is super cool now, like really, really cool. And we didn't buy anything in there, but the experience was amazing.
David DeVore (45:47.031)
Hmm.
David DeVore (45:56.089)
Hmm.
David DeVore (46:00.956)
Oh, interesting.
David DeVore (46:07.256)
Oh yeah.
Bob Ullery (46:10.89)
had to have spent a boatload of money on it, massively huge and cool. But I think it makes sense. I think the strategy, I love to see the measurements on this because I think they made a brand fan out of my kid inside of 45 minutes, which is incredible. Just incredible.
David DeVore (46:24.819)
Right. And, and, and they never get to them through an ad like that, you know, just not, not even gonna happen. Right. So, um, yeah.
Bob Ullery (46:35.03)
And for better or worse, you know, like, when a kid makes up his mind about something that potentially could be a decision that sticks with them forever through their whole lifespan, right? Let's say that's why I like the Cubs, right? I don't like the Yankees, even though Yankees win all the time. And the Cubs don't win that often. I still love the Cubs. Why? Because I made that decision when I was five. I'm sticking to it. Right? And
David DeVore (46:43.528)
Oh yeah.
for sure. creates nostalgia. Yeah.
David DeVore (46:57.692)
Mm. Mm, cut.
Kevin Nuest (46:59.49)
Procter and Gamble wants you to choose their toothpaste now for life, right?
Bob Ullery (47:03.574)
Yeah. Yup.
David DeVore (47:03.659)
for life, yeah.
Kevin Nuest (47:06.498)
Yeah. That, um, I want to go back to the, that macro and connect it back to the, the content creation too. We were talking about the, so, uh, there's this YouTube channel, uh, called in a nutshell, Kurt's Kazaa. They did a really good macro video called, uh, the internet is worse than ever. Now what? Right. And so it does, it hits on exactly what we just talked about, right? It really is the worst than ever. So the, the short of it is definitely go watch this video, but the short of it is we used to.
Our communities used to be hyper local geographically. Our neighborhood was our community. And so then when we interacted, we, we interacted with our neighbors and that was you, your, your tribe, you try to make your neighborhood better. You, uh, you know, be nice to your neighbors because you're going to see them all the time, right? You don't go out your front door and just start yelling at your neighbor, uh, profanities because you're going to have to see them tomorrow. And the, the internet, you know, kind of broke that, right? Now you could yell profanities at people because you just may never see them again.
Right. Or they don't feel like they're disembodied. And so I am also excited about a time here shortly where we do get back to niche down communities, uh, throw another throwback out there, Dave, right? The, the forum, uh, the forums of old internet where it's like you found a, you found a forum and you hung out there and that was your corner of the universe and people you talked with, right. And it's red, it's red, it's that kind of throughout the thread, the last couple of
David DeVore (48:21.655)
Mm-hmm.
David DeVore (48:26.196)
Oh yeah.
Kevin Nuest (48:33.19)
decades, let's say, and they've, they've held pretty good to a lot of that and enabled it. It's, it just needs to go, it's going to go even further, right? It's going to go even further with, you know, content creation and experiences. And so then assume that's true. Assume we decentralized communities. That's what that is. Move away from centralized platforms like Twitter and meta and you're decentralizing communities, right? And they'll the Reddit helped do that with the.
cost of software going to zero, being able to create a custom community somewhere is going to be free. Right. That's, that's why we use platforms like Reddit today, because we can't stand up all of that infrastructure and, and point people to it. So assume that you can assume that you can build your own whole little community. Uh, well now brands need to go find and reach all those little communities and talk to them, right? Procter and gamble needs not just one of those communities to buy its toothpaste. It needs all of them. And.
David DeVore (49:26.487)
Mm-hmm.
David DeVore (49:31.063)
All right.
Kevin Nuest (49:31.622)
Each one of them wants to be talked to differently to be authentic to that community, otherwise it is just an ad. Otherwise it is, Hey, buy this toothpaste one by one of the portfolios toothpaste and here's your banner ad. Not going to be effective. So we will very, very quickly assume we're heading towards a world of decentralized communities, uh, which we've already seen in web three, right? Is the, uh, starting proof point of that, then brands have to be able to talk to those.
David DeVore (49:36.596)
Mm-hmm.
David DeVore (49:40.662)
Right.
Kevin Nuest (50:01.61)
communities at scale and in web three, we saw them fail. They couldn't right. They tried to push the same message to them or they got to one community and it wasn't enough to move the needle for a big brand to then talk to, you know, one to five to 10,000 people. It didn't move the needle for them. So they stopped, uh, and they didn't figure out how to solve this problem. They're going to have to.
David DeVore (50:08.813)
Mm.
David DeVore (50:11.944)
Right.
David DeVore (50:24.843)
For sure. Yeah. One of the things that is interesting to me is that there's, it seems like what we're talking about content. It's, it's, it's always interesting to me how, um, on a community level. Text is
so pervasive, right? Like on community level and it hasn't changed, right? That hasn't changed since you know, whatever like PHP, you know, what was it? PHP BB what, you know, I can't remember what from back in the day all the way up through Reddit all the way to discord all the way you know, like, the places even even, you know, with threads and so forth, like it's, it's always surprising. It's interesting to me that community is always so tied.
Kevin Nuest (50:56.351)
Mm-hmm.
David DeVore (51:14.743)
text, I think that it seems like the other side of community that we're starting to see emerge, you know, and they're without a doubt, you know, you've got Facebook groups and whatnot, but it's, it's going to be really interesting to see. And it's already happening the communities that bubble up and converge inside of inside of VR, right and inside of games. And generally, like they're super because they're running, you know, there's
because they are running around interacting with each other, meeting up in, you know, meeting up in, you know, at this space or that space, there's no record per se of not like not like a Twitter thread or not like, you know, there's no record of what is what's happened, what the conversation is, what the perspective is, it's just like, hey, but then they're out, right?
And so it's going to be really, I think it's just going to be sort of fascinating. And that makes the whole thing really hard. I mean, in terms of like having a record of content of what has happened, um, it's there and again, sort of this, like it's there and gone and so therefore, you know, it's, it starts to become less about sort of inserting yourself into a conversation as about creating an amazing experience that then the conversations can happen in. Um,
So.
Bob Ullery (52:39.318)
Part of that's progress, right? I mean, I think the reason we have so many text-based communities is that's the state of progress, you know? Like, until now, I think, you know, would you use your audio mic two years ago to dictate something that you're gonna post on Twitter? Maybe. It would do an okay job of transcribing it to your text. Not always. You're probably gonna have to use your keyboard anyways, right, to clean it up. So people are just kind of relegated to that. And then...
Here comes audio and video and that, you know, the Snapchats of the world proliferate outside looking in when, when those platforms started to pop up. I was like, ah, that's okay. Like tick tock is not going to be that big. Who wants to, who wants to create a whole network on dancing? But, uh, I'll, I'll take that L. Um, but you know, you think about just continual progress, like there will be a day and this is super scary. Like there's not going to be any interfaces. We're going to pop our Neuralink song.
Kevin Nuest (53:24.563)
Hehehe
Bob Ullery (53:37.578)
And like, we're just going to create a little social network in real time based on just our brains doing something. Who knows what that even looks like when you're experiencing yourself where it's like mind melding. There's no text. There's no audio. There's no video. It's like all of those things combined in our brains. That's wild to think about. But it's just a it's just progression. Like, who knows?
David DeVore (53:58.006)
Yeah.
Kevin Nuest (53:58.618)
Yeah. In, in the, the 3d avatar progression too, is just now really coming into that same, uh, peak and potential as the audio dictation. And so that in itself could create more opportunities while, while obviously people have not been afraid to post videos on tick tock at the same time. Absolutely. People are DMing and text and texting people, uh, in text.
Instead of sending a quick little video for whatever reason, they're not camera ready. They're not necessarily the place where they want to use a camera, right? Uh, for all those myriad of reasons, they don't actually want to record their audio from that place. And now it's like, well, we can generate a video of Dave sending me a quick 32nd message that says, you know, that he's dictated that is in his voice. That's cleaned up from any background noise and is in whatever location he wants to be, and he can be a.
a T-Rex instead of himself, right? And, and he just sends that to me and that's, and that's how I get this message. And I get the content instead of a wall of text that's hard to digest as an audio learner, I'm stoked about this future. We're heading into a much more audio content, uh, and video content's fine, but the ability to listen, the ability to crank things up to two X and listen. I know we use, you know, fireflies for, for meeting recordings.
David DeVore (54:57.394)
Mm-hmm.
Kevin Nuest (55:23.482)
I love to be able to catch up on a meeting or the back half of a meeting at 2x speed and it takes me 10 minutes and I've got the entire meeting. All right, so good.
David DeVore (55:29.239)
Yeah, in half the time, right? Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. One.
Bob Ullery (55:33.802)
I'm just so bad Dave can be his true self as a T-Rex. That's what. That's the real way.
David DeVore (55:37.875)
Hehe hehehe
Kevin Nuest (55:40.774)
He is a T-Rex, that's a spirit animal for sure.
David DeVore (55:43.655)
except that I need some tiny arms. One of these days on another show, we should unpack all the potential ways that we're, you mentioned Fireflies, right? I'm working right now on setting up some, marketing automation with Zapier and ChetchTP. We should unpack tools that we're using, because we are...
Kevin Nuest (55:45.811)
Hahaha
David DeVore (56:10.671)
I think that Calvin said that he was like, did he say he was like 60, 70% AI enabled through his day right now? You know, which he was already fast. Like now he's like, now it's like, you know, Superman. And it
Bob Ullery (56:25.71)
Yeah.
Kevin Nuest (56:27.486)
That's taking a proverbial 10x developer and making them a 100x developer right there.
David DeVore (56:32.507)
For sure. Oh my gosh. Um, but you know, so future show, uh, this is great. We've, we have, you know, we're coming up on an hour. Um, so I just want to thank you guys for having this conversation around content and where it's going and super fun to sort of dive into all the different forms of content and world building and, um, engagement with youth and all the, all of that conversation is really, really relevant. Um,
And there's so much so much more coming in this regard. So thank you for tuning in and everybody you know, have a great day.
Bob Ullery (57:12.13)
Thanks, y'all. See ya.
David DeVore (57:13.559)
See you guys.