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This is the official podcast of Marketing Machine. We're the podcast that makes you a better marketer. This goes along with our newsletter. Sign up at https://marketingmachine.studio
Kerp (00:01)
Okay, my mic is working because the Phantom power is on.
Mackenzie (00:04)
have you heard Phantom Power by the hip?
Kerp (00:08)
I, I have not, but the phantom power is the piggyback 48 volt signal and an XLR cable. That's not that that's not necessarily esoterica that I can trust other people know out in the world.
Mackenzie (00:10)
It's a good album.
Yeah, yeah, I know. I know. Actually, the cover of the album.
Yeah. Yeah, actually the album cover was like a vocal compressor that had like the phantom power like light right there in the center.
Kerp (00:30)
Okay, yeah.
Let's do a podcast.
welcome back for another Marketing Machine Podcast. I'm Adam.
Mackenzie (00:37)
I'm McKenzie.
Kerp (00:39)
Should have said welcome back earlier, because now in the script I'm supposed to say welcome back for another hang in the machine shop. Talking about all things marketing technology. That means a lot of AI these days, if we're totally honest.
Mackenzie (00:55)
We have a plan for today that requires you to not have a beer in your hand. Normally it would be better, but today we're going places. By the end you're going to be like, holy moly, how did they do that?
Kerp (01:04)
If I had the time for the edit right now, I would drop in a clip of the Monty Python philosophers, philosopher skit with the beer drinking philosopher skit. And thus I date myself, which is good flow into the intro. I'm Adam Kerpelman. I'm the founder of marketing machine. When I'm not running and starting marketing machine and pontificating about marketing.
topics through our channels. when I'm not doing that, I teach entrepreneurship and, actually I'm working on a generative AI course for the university of Virginia in their undergraduate business school, McIntire school of commerce.
My official title is lecturer of commerce, but it's all proprietary, whatever. They call me professor.
Mackenzie (01:54)
My name is Mackenzie Bose. I'm Canadian and I'm six foot six, but when people ask, I tell them I'm six foot two.
Kerp (02:02)
You are the second podcast host that I have done well enough in terms of like putting a show together on the fly with to pursue to continue to do this. The other one is six, seven. It might be six, nine. the, and I'm not trying to like one up you. It's more so, it's just, it's an interesting.
Mackenzie (02:20)
Yeah, what's with tall guys in podcasts? Maybe they have like an eagle problem or something.
Kerp (02:22)
Well, it's more like, well, I have a theory that we've discussed on the other podcast that I did with him years ago, which was that you're tall enough that when you walk in a room, everybody already goes, is that a threat? And looks at it looks in your direction, which really like molds your personality in terms of I'm down at a height where like I'm tall enough to be authoritative at six to
Mackenzie (02:36)
Hehehehe
Kerp (02:48)
But I don't necessarily turn heads when I walk in the room with people's like threat meter going off and going, there is someone who could punch me on the top of my head. Right. And it's resulted in a personality that is for him, at least that is very.
that is similar in a way that when it matches creativity and curiosity results in the kinds of conversations that I want to have.
Mackenzie (03:17)
That is a good segue to the topics that we have planned. So we're going to hit, we're going to hit on both like, so this like personality thing, like, tall guys have similar personalities that we will explain in a moment, but we're going to start with creativity. We were reading because we're geniuses and we can read all our letters really good. So we were reading this article by Wired called Apple AI is going to kill productivity or something like that.
Kerp (03:44)
Was it wired? I'm gonna go check the leg.
Mackenzie (03:46)
Or somebody, I don't know. I took problem with the headline itself. Not like the headline, like writer, right? Like that person's fine. But I was looking at the headline and I was like, what do you mean? Right? Like, what does it mean to kill AI? Why are you saying kill? That sounds like not good, right? But, or to kill creativity, why is it being killed? What even is creativity in your mind? Like, why are you saying this right now? Why did you think that this headline was going to be good? Not insulting, by the way.
Like just what is going on culturally to make that a good headline that you sent out as part of your job. So first of all, like creativity is something that like we, as a culture, we don't actually value that much, but we say that we do, which is kind of like a weird thing, right? Do you have like examples of this?
Kerp (04:37)
yeah. I mean, I was absolutely going to say that that's you look at anyone who's not a pop culturally famous artist and they have lived the side where it's like, yeah, everybody talks about how important art is, but they don't then go fight for the things that protect the ability to start doing it without being in a race to the bottom. Like rat race of, yeah, I could do that.
And so
It's an interesting, it's a really interesting thing because we, cause we value it because we associate it with innovation, which gets us to like economic activity. And so you look at companies like Apple and you go, well, they must be creative. They invented all this stuff.
Mackenzie (05:25)
Yeah, indeed. I have similar problems with the word innovation. I think that people put innovation on a pedestal similar to creativity when they don't really like either of those things. So I've identified that creativity has kind of two components, which is productivity and deviance. And indeed, deviance is quite frankly punished. And creativity can be used as an insult, right? Like a child hands you a drawing of like a purple lion and a blue sun, and you're like, well, at least it's creative.
Kerp (05:28)
Yeah.
One last thing to say before we dive down the rabbit hole is there's only the second episode of the podcast. If you're listening, thanks. Thanks. Sincerely, thank you for joining us. The thing is still taking shape. The conversation we had right before we started recording this was that we're not going to cover topical stuff because we have a newsletter for that. So.
Go sign up for the newsletter at marketing machine dot studio. If you want to get a weekly roundup of marketing news, AI news related and lateral topics, inspiration, all kinds of things like that, that come across our desk working as marketers or in your case, engineer.
Yeah, me, we, we, along with the team round them up, send them out over email every Friday, but that frees up this time to do things that, you know, like I'm just being a media theorist about it to some degree too. Like this is content for doing the dishes. let's talk about, let's, let's philosophize.
Mackenzie (06:36)
Yeah, good luck.
Yeah, there's also like a power distribution to like, people who stick with serialized content, like podcasts, but like everybody checks it out. They get through like the first three episodes and then they disappear forever. So, if you're a marketer and you're hearing what we're doing right now, which is like putting this plugin right away, even though we're not good at plugging yet. please go to what's the URL again.
Kerp (06:54)
Yeah.
Right.
marketing machine dot studio. Sign up for the podcast. Sign up for the newsletter.
Mackenzie (07:09)
Marketing machine dot studio, because 90 % of the people who are going to check out our podcast ever are going to hear this message. So one more time, marketing machine dot studio to get topical information in your inbox for as long as a curb and team enjoy writing that stuff.
Kerp (07:24)
and our budget and ability to get consulting work sustains us. That said, and this is a good segue to the pontificating. It's a research project. So part of the reason I do this is for me, it's one of the most densely effective and productive in terms of media creation ways to discuss research topics with you eventually guests.
Mackenzie (07:27)
Yeah, yeah, let's get back to the pontificating.
Kerp (07:54)
other experts in the space so that I can continue to do my job as a professor, which is to like really be in the weeds of this stuff. Having the conversation that's like, you really have to devote and ask, you know, like, like a degree of depth to it, to move forward. And a lot of that was just, you just talk to experts and you write down what they say and you talk to experts and you write down what they say. So, this is, yeah, this is my way of doing that. So, yeah. So kills creativity.
Mackenzie (08:15)
The Lex Friedman method. Cool.
So AI is killing creativity. What does that mean? Why is it bad? And so what I think is like creativity is yeah, productivity plus the...
Kerp (08:27)
What is creativity was the first question. I took a whole ass philosophy class called aesthetics. That was, was one of the things in my philosophy career and in my art career that really caused me to like, it broke my brain for what I expected to talk about in that sect of philosophy. And then what it actually ended up being about, like we never even got to what makes art good because we were working on, yeah, but is it even art? I don't think it's art. Peace.
Mackenzie (08:33)
Yeah.
Kerp (08:55)
We're done with this conversation. Like that's, that was the extent of the argument we tried to refute for an entire semester of like writing papers and reading things. And there's all kinds of crazy depth on that thing of what is art. There is similar depth on what is creativity, but then creativity hurts this thing where it hits this thing where it's about output and a, and a, and a like, and then it hits digital marketing.
Mackenzie (09:08)
I think now, like...
Yeah.
Kerp (09:22)
because there we can start to run tests where we have this interesting quantified data on literally like, do more people are more people drawn to this image? Cool. Does that make it art? I don't know. Right. does it take creativity to produce that thing? We call the department that does it creative. it's literally like, do you have the creative for that ad campaign?
Mackenzie (09:51)
artifact is called a creative. Yeah. And so like speaking of artifacts, like I think the ability, like there was like an art movement of like recontextualization. I can't remember the name, but there was that like urinal that the guy just turned upside down and he's like, Hey, this is a sculpture. We're good. that kind of like recontextualization of like useful. The fountain. Yeah. Yeah. But, because, and that was like a hundred years ago.
Kerp (09:54)
Ha ha.
It's called Fountain. I can't remember the artist, but...
Mackenzie (10:16)
Right? So we had this like movement of let's, let's recontextualize, utilitarian objects into artful objects and then consider like the aesthetics of that kind of recontextualization. This can be applied to everything. so it could be applied to like the way that you shower, right? It could be, it could be applied to the way that you put on like your socks, whatever that could be turned into a video. That video is a vignette that says something about like, the hedonic treadmill and like, nothing is exciting. Like there's ways like each like.
activity that you do could be theoretically recontextualized. So it is art without the frame. Every single thing is art. It just doesn't have a frame yet. That's, I think, the only hearing way to answer that question.
Kerp (10:57)
My final paper, so for my final paper for aesthetics, I went and I said, look, this is ambitious, but instead of answering the prompt question that you put out there, can I do 20 pages on like a theory of what is art? And I still sort of stand by this. And now I can't remember if I used the word back then.
but it matches the worldview that gets to marketing, I think, and even gets to AI, which is the idea that like, if it can pull attention, it's art, but possibly only for that second that it's pulling attention. So if I just go, this is a pen and put it on the table in front of you, it's like, is that a pen for a second? You don't know. It might be art. And then you're like, no, it has a pen and you move on. Right. But for that second. But it's like we were talking about the same seam in human attention.
in the space anyway. I don't know if that's too far in the weeds, but.
Mackenzie (11:56)
No, I'm sure, because there's examples, like we're getting off the thread a little bit here, but there's like a lot of like our archaeological finds of like ancient human history were in the dirt. Who put them in the dirt? Who threw this on the ground, right? If it was art when it was made, it certainly was not by the time it was buried. So I think that you're right, that there's a temporal axis here. So, but anyways, like art aside.
Kerp (12:19)
And what you were just talking about, the last thing I was going to say, and this may be a transition into what we were talking about. It's funny that you said that. And I wanted to, and immediately I was like, Ooh, I can plug the discord. If you go all the way to the bottom of the website, there's a link to join a discord, which is very much also still getting on its feet. it's where we do live content and stuff like that to three or four visitors who show up because we're not aggressively pushing this thing. I, although maybe this sounds aggressive because now I've been talking about it for so long.
point is, we have a philosophize channel where I just shared a video that I don't know if you were referencing on purpose, or not, or if I just incepted this into you. It's literally Alan Watts, like from the 60s, talking about appreciating the dance of doing the dishes, like kind of because it's the only way to get through life. Like Zen philosophy.
But that sounds like the vignette you pitched to some degree.
Mackenzie (13:18)
Hmm. Yeah. It just, it hasn't been like, if, if it's not art, it's because it hasn't been framed as such yet. so the, that aside, like this, like AI kills creativity thing, like now that we know that what creativity is, we kind of like agree that like creativity is just like productivity plus little changes. Right. So that could also be like innovation.
Right. You take something and you're making little changes to it to try to get towards some goal. Creativity is generally taking something, making it with little changes, not towards a goal. Right. Just to be different, just to see what happens. Right. And so that's why I call it deviance. Cause it's non, not necessarily like beneficial deep, like changes. It's just different.
And so deviance is like generally punished. So if, if you know a creative, give them a hug because they're sitting there and like doing weird little things that they don't know if anyone's ever going to like. And honestly, they probably won't like 99 % of creative work is not only like not celebrated in our culture, but honestly it's punished. And so if the deviance isn't the thing that makes this work, taking it back to AI, if, if we actually don't like creativity in practice because of the deviance and sometimes we can make things that are bad.
different in a bad way. Then AI kind of like puts guardrails on the things that we can make. It increases the productivity while reducing the deviance. That seems highly aligned with what we value about creativity.
Kerp (14:49)
Which?
Well, what we actually value about creativity, right? The part of creativity that turns into money, which is why I was referencing big companies earlier.
value, you know, is a carefully selected term there. Because you can get lost in the philosophical thing, right? Do we value this at it, you know, as a philosophy versus do we turn this through capitalism into economic dollars or whatever, right? Currency, like through through means of production, right? Production of whatever, right?
Mackenzie (15:26)
Yeah, and I would say it's like the same statement.
Kerp (15:35)
But there's a, but there's a, like, there's also a, not a, slap back is not the right term, but like when they try to.
study what constitutes creativity. Like, okay, how did we, you know,
They think about this a lot in terms of like team coordination. maybe it's just as a manager, but also as a consultant, I guess, which is like, okay, there's 30 people here. They all have a different idea of what a thing means. How can you guide them to like a collaborative understanding of the central thing? and so we have data out of the consulting world about like,
How many of these should I tell you to come up with? 30? Cool. 30 ideas for the name of a product. And the people in the room just make a bunch of stuff. And then you narrow that down. But it starts from that thing of how many iterations? And you do end up talking about the extent to which people that are good at coming up with, if you reduce creativity to...
good at coming up with sufficiently deviant ideas that solve a certain problem, then you get to problem solving and the idea of like, it's a virtue in problem solving. And the science seems to support this to, not just be deviant, like you said, but to be willing to.
like it gets into that space of like strong opinions loosely held right I have 15 different opinions about what might work in this campaign but like the second I get some data that comes in that says and if people aren't clicking on that one I go huh like and I add it to my model of you know who we're trying to reach here but
that deviance is for sure an important part of creativity. Although you can understand why as a broader social thing, deviating from norms is absolutely a thing that societies push against. Even though whatever. And you're right. So it hits. And we're already. And the thing about where it hits marketing and then it gets I think this gets our transition to mediocrity and the idea of the AI problem, which is OK, so.
Mackenzie (17:59)
But we still verbally celebrate it, right? So that's like the weirdness.
Kerp (18:12)
if what we're up against here is now.
we can deviate more because productivity goes to the roof and now I can run an iteration of a thousand things where I used to be able to run 10.
And we still have to decide what's good, which is what probably gets us back to the creativity thing. But yeah.
Mackenzie (18:33)
say that you could deviate less with AI. There's things that it won't do. Like consider the the Strokes album covers. They have two covers for Is This It? And one of them is a butt and one of them is some atoms colliding. And the AI would never give you the butt.
Kerp (18:48)
Well, that's where it hits marketing. That's fine with me if I'm running a marketing campaign. And like I said, at past the point, I'm running on data and not on like an ego driven feeling about what I thought the customer was going to like and how well I aligned to a thing that sold to them. Although there's an ego component that's like, okay, I'm going to break in over here. How are we going to do that?
Mackenzie (18:55)
Big time.
Kerp (19:17)
And sometimes strategically, that's like be the be the be the brand that says fuck. I've literally I pitched this to someone yesterday. I said you could run an ad that just says that's a good fucking sandwich. Well, we'll black out two of the letters. It'll be fine. We can run it on the court. You can run it on the feeds. You live in a college town. You could probably pull off being the fucking sandwich place and get some traction.
Mackenzie (19:23)
Hehehehehe
You could.
Yes.
Mm -hmm. So.
Kerp (19:45)
But you gotta make that decision. It's deviant.
Mackenzie (19:48)
So, okay, so like to get to like the back half of the podcast, what we need to connect here is the idea of like, create, like we've like shown that creativity is generally like punished. It's true creativity, not useful in a marketing environment, doesn't convert to dollars.
Kerp (20:02)
Go write a song, see how many of your friends actually listen to it when you put it on YouTube.
Mackenzie (20:05)
Exactly. So creativity is generally punished in action, but it's celebrated verbally. AI killing creativity is a good headline because creativity is something that we verbally agree is a good thing, even though we all behave differently. Okay. So what is, what, why, what is the reason for that? Right. How did that happen?
Kerp (20:21)
right with our dollars.
Mackenzie (20:25)
And so I was thinking about it and I was like, there's actually like an advertising precept that shows me what this is. And so in advertising, and so another thing I was talking about and preparing for the show is the difference between the marketing education that you can get at different stages of business and how much it applies to you. So when you're starting out, and you, you know, your family, you're not coming for money. You're not like getting inserted into a corporate kind of, advertising budget of like $10 million a year.
for like marketing for the rest of us, the 80 % of American small businesses that have less than 50 employees that aren't selling that much, right? That like are struggling to get established or they're getting kicked out by these kinds of large brands with these $10 million budgets. The key at this like small size is simply frequency. You don't really need to like dial in your brand that hard. You don't need to dial in your USP that much, especially if you're selling a commodity. What you need to do is to get to the saturation of your market.
first. And this is the same thing, right? The human brain is dealing with like, that is a good strategy for the same reason that we verbally celebrate creativity. And it's a mental bias, it's a heuristic that all humans use called availability. If we see something over and over, because by the way, like here's where we get kind of crazy. A human being is not an atomic item.
in multiple, in both kind of size dimensions. So a human being is not an atomic item because your cells have organelles and organelles have, are like invaders into the cells that make it behave differently. And you have specialized cells for your body that were like kind of imported to make multicellular organisms, like different cells got together to make more complex machinations. And now your DNA like tells how to like organize these cells that you've like inherited just from the primordial soup.
There's no like human cell. There's kind of like human type cells, but you have a bunch of different types that are based on like earlier existing single cell organisms. So you're not atomic smaller. You're also not atomic larger, right? If you sat in a box and you could never talk to another human, you would not be a human. You just, you wouldn't count, right? Like we are the experiences that we have with each other, the way that our brains like develop, the stories that we tell ourselves, our identities, our behavior.
They're all socially oriented. Okay? So for that reason, when you see other people talking about something, even if it's the fucking advertiser. Okay?
Kerp (22:57)
Right. Even if it's about like, yeah, the fucking sandwich place?
Mackenzie (23:02)
Yeah, I saw about it on Instagram, right? Like it wasn't it wasn't your friend John telling you about the fucking sandwich place, although it is a lot better when John does it. If it's Instagram saying it, you're seeing other people talk about this thing. And so because you're seeing that over and over, there's a high availability of that information and it leads you to start to agree. The truth is not related like.
Like, your behavior is not related to objective truth because we're not designed to handle objective truth. We're designed to get along with other people. So when you see people saying something over and over and over, you go, your identity changes so that you accept it, even if it's bullshit.
Kerp (23:46)
And social media hacks the shit out of this. So we have all kinds of data on how this works in the world. but I want to back it up. Here's what Wikipedia says about availability cascade and availability cascade is the self reinforcing cycle that explains the development of certain kinds of collective beliefs. A novel idea or insight, usually one that seems to explain a complex process in a simpler, straightforward manner gains rapid currency in the popular discourse by its very simplicity and it by its apparent insightfulness.
Mackenzie (23:49)
Thanks.
Kerp (24:15)
Popularity triggers a chain reaction within the social network. anyway, it goes on from there, but like, that's what gets us to your point that you made. I don't know if you've said it here or in chat on discord, but as marketers, we all have to acknowledge that although we are in a creative department, we are the creative department.
in a lot of cases inside of a company. The way you hit channel saturation is through middling content that gets to as many people as possible who are then willing to go, yeah, I care enough to tap into your next thing. And then that that next level, you got a different chunk of content for them. Marketing strategy, et cetera. But like to pull off the top of funnel stuff.
It a little bit doesn't matter if this podcast is really good. The fact that it exists is the thing that will win part of the game. So when AI hits that, I don't care if it's mediocre. If it's 10 % better than average, it'll score in the machine and I can turn it into traffic that goes a direction, right?
Mackenzie (25:21)
I would go further.
I would go further, I would go further than this. It can't be good because if we're creating art, right, if we're actually being creative and we're making something that's deviant and makes people stop and think, they're not interested in that. And it doesn't hit the availability cascade. We need simple information to be going out. And that's why AI is so good for marketing because it doesn't get cute with you. It just gives you like straight down the middle, like...
Kerp (25:51)
Right.
Mackenzie (25:58)
Not like nitwit, like it's not like an idiot. Yeah.
Kerp (25:58)
Statistically average it's literally computer science to find the statistically average best Most pleasing answer to this whatever right and answer isn't even the right way to say it most pleasing next letter to go in the middle to shoot You know to go next Straight down the middle. Yeah
Mackenzie (26:17)
Straight down the middle. Yeah, so what I think is going on with this headline is we all collectively agreed through an availability cascade that creativity is good, even though we punish it, we all agree that it's good. And I think it's as a way to deal with the collective guilt of thanking people for throwing themselves on the grindstone of trying to make something work. We know 99 % of them aren't gonna make it, but if nobody did it, we wouldn't get those diamonds, right?
So that's the availability cascade. We have to say that it's good. Everyone agrees. Everyone says that creativity is good. Everyone says that AI killing creativity is bad because everyone says that creativity is good because of the same phenomenons that go into making a good advertising campaign. Isn't that crazy?
Kerp (27:05)
I, I would say another frame is creativity is so important and valuable that we have created a top tier of producers of whatever we should define as actual creativity. And you can track this with pop culture and art, or you can track it through business if you want. But like we take the top 10 % and we give them so much money that everyone sits around in dreams of like.
I could write a song like yesterday. I'm gonna take a shot at it. And some people chase it further than others. But like, it, it, it, it's so important that we continue to have it for the purpose of technology. And I mean that as a technologist, like it's so important for finding better ways to do things. Even if that's just whatever, then like pop culture, one of my arguments in favor of pop culture, having spent a lot of time around art people,
and punks. I have had to do a lot of defending Katy Perry. Because like, honestly, I believe it may not be for you. But if that many people showed up and bought the album, you were objectively wrong about something of value that's happening there.
Mackenzie (28:10)
Hehehehehe
Yeah. So yeah, like, like there's a statement, good art doesn't sell or art that sells is good. Right. So, so what AI lets you do. Right. So the other, the note that we have on our like to -do list here is, the, the next thing is how availability contributes to like AI discussion. Right. So like we're, we're ever the optimist, right? Like AI is here to stay and it's going to be useful, but people can leverage what's going on with availability collapses.
Kerp (28:31)
Right.
Mackenzie (28:53)
in order to push different agendas. So my hope for you in listening to this is that you learn to watch out for it. When you see an article like, here's how AI kills creativity, I'm sorry, but you're going to have to put on your thinking cap for a second and kind of figure out like, what does that actually mean? Or this is the most unfortunate outcome is that you, you do buy into it without thinking about it because everybody's saying that AI is bad and kills creativity.
Big air quotes, right? You might not be watching the video, everybody, when it's just like one publication. That can happen. So, like that's how it impacts things, right? Like the sentiment around AI can go up and down by like connecting AI to different things that we already have sentiment about, but don't let that stop you because the next thing on the to -do list is how to leverage it for your business. And we hit on this a little bit earlier with how AI makes straight down the middle content.
I'm going to pass things over to Kirk to think about some other ways to leverage this middlingness to hit the goals of small businesses, small medium businesses, kind of before we get to the Coca -Cola budgets on hitting frequency, hitting saturation and getting your own availability cascade in your local market.
Kerp (30:10)
Yeah. I think, I mean, the take on that, that I present in a more conservative light when I need to in, you know, conversations with clients or other professors or students or whatever. Like I talked to a diverse population about these topics is that I call myself an AI pragmatist, which is to just say in a world where middling content is a strategy that can make you money. AI is going to have a place.
just driving the volume of content up. and so it's not even an, it's an optimist thing because I need to be able to live with myself in terms of like, how am I going to think about how we can use this stuff to do projects, better the world, solve problems, whatever. But it's because I believe that it's happening to some extent, no matter what, because of the economic backbone that you just talked about, right?
in a world where just availability, having a saturation such that people bump into it is just part of marketing. We call it an awareness campaign. It's literally just, and honestly, if you're listening to this, you're probably on our retargeting list already. So keep your eyes peeled for ads that say be a better marketer and not much else. Cause the point is just to show it to you so much that eventually you're like, your brain goes, what is this anyway? And you.
Mackenzie (31:33)
This podcast will make me a better marketer. People have been, many folks are saying this. Many intelligent publications have been stating marketing machine will make me a better marketer. Right? It just.
Kerp (31:35)
Hahaha.
And if you I'm paying good money for it. But honestly, if you stuck around for for this long, like subscribe. Part of what we're about here is just exploring this scene to try and understand what like being at the edge of marketing and AI right now is to be right at the forefront of a bunch of crazy stuff that's happening. And I don't know the answers. Right. I say I teach this stuff is only because I'm incrementally ahead.
Mackenzie (31:46)
Hehehehe
Kerp (32:14)
And then using some degree of creativity to extrapolate into a mental model that's worthwhile enough for me to talk about it to students, but like, man, I don't know. So we're here to talk about it and to talk about, you know, I think, I think what I'm pivoting off of here is just the, like, we're here to talk pretty frankly, even about just the stuff that like we're doing as marketers trying to launch products, working inside of products.
I'm over here using AI to make more stuff because I know there are channels I can saturate. If only locally, if only, and locally is the internet now. I mean, within a community, then we get to the reason that I have my entrepreneurship students read Kevin Kelly's a thousand true fans, even though we all get a laugh out of how like 1996 the website is, but like to flip that another way.
That's such an important post. It doesn't matter that the website it's on hasn't been updated design wise since the nineties or whatever, whenever the post came out, 2000 might be the early two thousands, but like, it's just about how if you can hit a critical mass of people that care about the thing you're selling and he's talking about art in this context, but I think it can like my great hope with AI and that the pragmatic part is.
Mackenzie (33:23)
Yeah, so one thing.
Kerp (33:38)
It's going to proliferate to some extent. See our previous episode where we talked about, it's going to proliferate to some extent through edge compute to provide X, Y, and Z problem solving mechanism on computation devices across a population. What does this do to the notion and where it hits business, where it hits art that like, okay, if I can get a thousand people to give me 25 bucks a month, I have an operational budget to do things with. Right. And so.
You know, it gets weird with SAS and it gets weird with all kinds of things. Once it's like purely digital, but in between there's still digital channels that just aren't saturated for things as simple as like a local Jersey Mike's, you know, which, which is a sandwich shop in town, you know,
Mackenzie (34:22)
That's a good topic for next week. We should talk about like blue oceaning and like being able to set smaller targets with your campaign. I want to send the people home today with a recipe and something about AI communication that I haven't been enjoying because it mostly proliferates on social media, which have limited post counts, is the temporal nature of multi -turn chat that a lot of people are unfortunately missing just due to a mismatch of like what the tool actually is and the ways that we can easily communicate about it.
If you went to chat GPT right now and said, I need a tagline for my XYZ, insert your business here. you're going to get something that's not useful. It is going to be like middling, but it's going to try to get cute with it. It'll do, alliteration, which is annoying, but some like there's this great advertising book called Whipple Squeeze This. Sometimes an annoying ad outperforms like a not annoying ad. So that's something to think about. But.
Kerp (35:10)
Right.
That's a good fucking sandwich.
Mackenzie (35:20)
But, okay, so like to finish up the recipe, whatever your prompt is, like give me a tagline for my XYZ brand, make it simpler. And then when it gives you a simpler version, do it again, right? And just don't, like.
Kerp (35:33)
Right. Yeah. And so some of that is about like, this gets to the space of what's popularly called prompt engineering, but I kind of don't like that as a term because I think prompt engineering is another more technical thing, but like the idea of how do you talk to these agents? Like I'm literally working co -pilot style with chat GPT to develop a course right now.
And I always go back to the exact same conversation because that's where the model will have the context for literally everything I've talked about with this course so far. if only to inform the downstream nuance as I continue to develop the, the content basically.
to plug myself,
Mackenzie (36:20)
There's other interesting engineering things you can do, AI function calling so it can write down a scratch pad. It doesn't all have to do in the chat, right? So there is like a theoretical improvement and actually OpenAI rolled this out with the memories, but it only writes down information about you as an author. It doesn't write down information about your specific project. So there's room out there, like, and I implore you to please associate yourself with engineering, associate yourself with the API.
because the things that you can do there are way more powerful than stuff that's available through Chat GPT natively. Like for example, you could give it a CSV to write notes in order. And that would be way more helpful, right? Like this multi -turn chat, the temporalness, the previous attention, all of that is the stuff that gets missed on social media. What I'm telling you right now is it gets better. Even when you get this recipe in, it'll get better. And that's something that we can talk about later on the show.
Kerp (37:13)
Yes, the place where the engineers talk to this stuff, which is what I want to reserve for prompt engineer, honestly, is like, familiarize yourself with the API. That for me is the difference. Can you write software mindful of prompts to talk to these things? That's prompt engineering, what people are doing. Otherwise,
is just learning how to talk to these agents, right? Because another example is sometimes I do what you're talking about, which is organize my thoughts in a traditional way somewhere else. And then I re -upload a document and say, okay, now we're working from this document. Let's go from there. I don't need the previous context because it was discarded in a source of truth.
But either way, it doesn't kill creativity because it's letting me move faster with the part of the process where I go, no, that's not a good idea. No, that's not a sequence. If I want to lead a user, a student, a consumer of a storytelling product, like a movie, like anyway, the rabbit hole is deep.
Mackenzie (38:05)
It.
It increases productivity at the expense of deviance, which is a good thing economically. So if you're here to be a better marketer, which means you're here to make a bunch of moolah, then AI will not kill creativity. And you can rest easy.
Kerp (38:29)
Absolutely not leads on leads. Anyway, this has been the marketing machine podcast. If you want to tap into the rest of our universe, go to marketing machine dot studio. You can, you can sign up for a newsletter and whatever else it's a website y 'all. It'll have the links to click on it. and, there will be links in the description, wherever you're listening to this, that'll get you places.
Mackenzie (38:52)
Yeah, we got to get going though, because we have in the Discord, we have our office hours immediately after we record. So all of the fun energy that you're feeling here is going to be on Discord. So if you like have questions about this, Heidi's got it. Yeah.
Kerp (39:02)
But, but slightly less edited.
Okay, let's get out of here. I've been Adam.
Mackenzie (39:13)
I've been Mackenzie, thanks for listening.
Kerp (39:14)
Take it easy everybody.