John Jantsch (00:00.878)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Mark Schafer. He's a futurist and the bestselling author of several influential marketing books, including the content code known and marketing rebellion. He's a marketing strategy consultant to many of the world's leading brands and acclaimed keynote speaker and a college educator. His blog Grow is one of the most acclaimed marketing blogs globally and his podcast, The Marketing Companion,

is in the top 1 % of all business shows on iTunes. But we're going to talk about his latest book today, Audacious, How Humans Win in an AI Marketing World. So Mark, welcome back to the show. You've been on several times.

MARK SCHAEFER (00:45.314)

Several times almost a regular

John Jantsch (00:47.76)

So I like to start with the title a lot of times. mean, what was kind of the genesis of that for you? Or is there something going on in the world today that says we need to be more audacious?

MARK SCHAEFER (01:02.866)

Well, you know, when I, I never have a plan or a schedule to write a book. I only write a book when I see some problem going on that I get curious about. And the problem I see today is that we're trying to discern where do humans fit in this new AI dominant world.

And we have this technology that's nipping at the heels of our skill sets, in some cases nipping at the heels of our very careers. And so I really needed to unwind and unpack where are we going to fit, where are we going to thrive. So really the main idea of this book is to explore the

Parts and by the way, I mean, I'm not sugarcoating this saying Kumbaya. It's all gonna be great. I'm saying no, no Kumbaya You know, there's some serious things going on but there are some places that really are Uniquely human and it had been somewhat overlooked in the in the marketing

sphere in the marketing portfolio, I think we've become sort of intoxicated with performance marketing. And I mean, it's important. And I'm talking about SEO and ads and optimizing, you know, our content and our ad purchases. That's very, very important. But as we've kind of overcompensated with that, we've kind of forgot about the heart and soul of marketing.

which is this human connection. And so in the book, I look at things like word of mouth marketing, which we know is really important, but I would suggest almost nobody listening to this today has a line item on their budget for word of mouth marketing. I talk about experiential marketing and this idea of shared experiences, which are the, with this lonely.

MARK SCHAEFER (03:21.826)

depressed world saying we want more shared experiences and that again is a uniquely human thing and The overarching umbrella I guess is this word, you know audacious because if you're merely competent you're vulnerable competent is ignorable and Marketing really is is I have research in the book that shows in general how dull marketing and advertising

is and there is an opportunity to like shed that skin and really ignite something a little crazy because you know the bots are coming but we still own crazy.

John Jantsch (04:05.725)

You know, how much, again, I find myself blaming the pandemic for so many things on this show when I talk about changes. And, you know, there are societal changes that I think occurred during that period that, like I sit in a restaurant now waiting on my food to come and I watched the line and stream of people who come in and pick up their to-go order and run back to their car. And I,

MARK SCHAEFER (04:20.088)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (04:32.676)

That came, I think, from the pandemic, a lot of that. But I also, you know, we talk about this need for human interaction, but you almost feel like people are actually withdrawing farther by choice.

MARK SCHAEFER (04:47.134)

I agree with you. think remote working is another sort of symptom of something that occurred with the pandemic. This idea of maybe more comfort with isolation. I think the other thing is that today, each of us can be our own independent media streaming channel. So we can experience our entire world.

by ourselves through earbuds. We can stream all the movies and TV and music and books that we love. And nobody else even has ever heard of the things that we're experiencing. And that's a key idea in this book that compared to when you and I were growing up as kids, we have a world without shared experiences. You know, when I was a kid, you had to save your money for a record album.

John Jantsch (05:24.897)

News.

MARK SCHAEFER (05:45.634)

And once you got that record album, people would come over to your house to listen to it. You'd play it over and over again. You'd sing the words, you know, on the, on the liner notes. If you wanted to see a movie, you had to find somebody that had a car. You climb in the car and then you'd have pizza afterwards. And the whole thing is a social experience that is absolutely missing from an entire generation today. And they're, they're, they're, they're crying out.

John Jantsch (05:59.824)

You

MARK SCHAEFER (06:14.52)

for shared experiences. And that's something that we can add in our marketing portfolio. When you bring people together in a meaningful way, and it doesn't have to be an activation, it could even be the way you hold meetings. If you bring people together in this meaningful way, it creates some sort of electric kind of experience.

It creates this thing called collective effervescence. It's this emotional contagion of awe. It's everyday awe of being with people and creating something new. And I think that is one of the most overlooked opportunities in marketing today.

John Jantsch (07:02.872)

One of the core ideas of the book is that we have to think about out humaning AI. Did I say that right? So how do we do that? I mean, it's not through IQ. So how do we do that?

MARK SCHAEFER (07:09.698)

Yeah.

MARK SCHAEFER (07:19.244)

Yeah. mean, isn't that weird that when you think about it, that this is the first time in history where a technology has come along and we can't take another class to transcend it. Right. I mean, we're not going to be smarter than AI. And so, you know, the idea behind the book is one of the biggest issues. Well, it's the biggest issue for any business today or any marketing

John Jantsch (07:30.384)

Right.

MARK SCHAEFER (07:49.038)

professional today is how is awareness. How do we stand out as the signal against the noise? And again, you know, AI is, is making that even worse because there it's like an endless infinite noise. So, so how, what can we do? And what I did, John, is I got to meet the greatest creatives in the world. And there's a story in the book is kind of like,

John Jantsch (08:00.95)

Just make a little noise.

MARK SCHAEFER (08:18.296)

how I started down this path and one door open and another door open. And it was just incredible gift, this amazing experience. And I got to learn what are the patterns? Is there something we can learn from their success that's scalable to every business? And what I found is that there is. So your marketing message, the story that you tell the world has three parts.

It's the story, the narrative, it's where we tell it, and it's who tells it. Now, what if we disrupted one of those things? We would be doing something that AI isn't really thinking about right now. mean, AI is looking at the whole world and kind of giving you the best average answer of everything that's happened in the past. But if you disrupt it,

John Jantsch (09:06.874)

Trying to average it.

MARK SCHAEFER (09:15.808)

and do something unexpected. Now you are moving toward a path where you're going to stand out. And so the book is full of case studies, full of prompts, big companies, small companies, big budgets, no budgets, nonprofits. So there's something in there for everybody to sort of like explore these patterns and apply it.

to a business or an organization of any size.

John Jantsch (09:47.536)

Give me an example, if you can think of one off the top of your head, of how a company or a brand can really embrace this idea of everyday awe.

MARK SCHAEFER (09:56.91)

every day off. Well, the example that I think is most relevant and personal to me, and I think this would be relevant to anybody, is so I hold a marketing retreat every year called The Uprising. And the problem I solve with this is, as you know, I used to this event called Social Slam. You were there. And I mean, I was having 600, 700 people

John Jantsch (10:21.486)

Mm-hmm. Yep.

MARK SCHAEFER (10:27.03)

And it was just a blur and it was stressful and I didn't like it. So I created this new event some years later. It's limited to 30 people. So it's intimate. And we're talking about our relevance in the future of marketing. Now I put my heart and soul into this and I think I did a good job. But when I got the feedback of the event, people told me something completely unexpected. They said this

was life-changing. I thought, what? What? Life-changing? mean, isn't that a little heavy? But I heard this over and over again. And I never really had an explanation until I connected the dots with this idea of collective effervescence. So in this group, these 30 people, we hike together in the woods. We eat together, gourmet food, and we

Actually, it's shared family style, right? We create every single moment is created to heighten interaction, to build on ideas. And as I read this idea of collective effervescence, I got this from this book called Awe by social psychologist, Dacher Keltner. And all of a sudden, OK, wait a minute.

That's the difference. It's this intimacy. It's this emotional contagion that's happening at my event that makes it unlike anything else. And so my marketing plan is add more awe. So it's like, how do I do it even better? How do I create even more of these magical moments that create

you know, new ideas and epiphanies in the people that are there. Just the pure joy of listening to music or, you know, singing together or something like that. you know, what, what can I do to even add more off? That's the marketing plan for my event. And so I challenge people in the book, you know, think about what you can do with your customer interactions, with your meetings.

MARK SCHAEFER (12:55.084)

With customer events, what if your marketing plan was add more off? How would that change the dynamic and make you into something different, something conversational, something unmissable, which is what we need to do today?

John Jantsch (13:13.552)

And the lesson of course for that is, I that's the brand people want to gravitate towards, right? And I think that one of the things that, you know, everybody talks about this platform or this new tool or this new technology and how marketing has changed. But I've felt for the last 10 years, the way people buy has changed more. And that that's what we ought to be paying more attention to. And I think that that's going to even be

More relevant, you know, because they're able, you know, think about how they could cut through all of the noise. Like they can take our 50 page ebook and say, give me the four. They can consume with AI as well as we can produce with AI. I think that that gives them even more leverage to only interact with brands that as you say, create every day off.

MARK SCHAEFER (14:02.242)

Yeah. And that's an extraordinary point that is quite profound, John, is that, you know, a lot of the conversations out there, a lot of the content out there is about how AI is changing our business and changing our workflow. It's creating a lot of new tools to perhaps unleash creativity. But we also need to be thinking about exactly what you're saying is that AI is also changing consumer behavior.

It's changing how it's going to consume our content. It's going to change how people make decisions. Because generally speaking, people don't want to do the work. They're averse to deep thinking. And so they're going to abdicate that in many cases to AI. I think the idea of truth is going to be sort of mixed up. And we may be turning AI to AI.

John Jantsch (14:31.472)

100%.

John Jantsch (14:47.172)

Yeah.

MARK SCHAEFER (15:00.846)

you know, to truth. So I think that's a very, it's a big idea and certainly a worthy conversation about how AI is going to be.

John Jantsch (15:09.102)

Well, why don't we just collaborate on another book, Mark, you and I will write that book. Well, let's write that book.

MARK SCHAEFER (15:12.494)

We should, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's do it. Let's do it.

John Jantsch (15:16.752)

Well, I saw some research the other day and they were talking about, just a year ago, you know, how people were using AI, you know, what, what, what was the biggest use case, right? So producing content stuff you'd, you'd think, and that already in 2025, the fastest growing way that people are using AI is as a companion. yeah. And therapy. so, so that behavior that you're talking about is happening and it will drive so much.

MARK SCHAEFER (15:26.786)

Yeah. Yeah.

MARK SCHAEFER (15:36.504)

Therapy. Yeah. Yeah.

MARK SCHAEFER (15:43.116)

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that I saw that same study and it was sort of jaw dropping. And it's funny because the day after I saw that study, I did a podcast episode with one of my co-hosts and it was kind of a strange episode about how do you keep working? How do you keep leading a business when you're suffering? And so my co-hosts

John Jantsch (15:51.407)

Yeah.

MARK SCHAEFER (16:13.142)

relies on AI as a therapist. She's actually built like custom GPTs to encourage her and counsel her when she's suffering. I thought, wow, that is something else. I mean, that is really, I mean, okay, well, it's working for her.

John Jantsch (16:34.8)

Well, you know, the right AI bot's probably got a lot of licenses.

MARK SCHAEFER (16:43.256)

Well, and again, this also points to, again, the changes in consumer behavior, because think about it, there's also this emerging preference for AI, let's call synthetic relationships. And I think this research about the therapy is sort of a leading indicator of that.

John Jantsch (17:02.746)

Bye.

MARK SCHAEFER (17:10.208)

is that you can be in a relationship with this entity that always tells you the right thing. There's no compromise. You don't really have to work on the relationship. you know, wow, I mean, what are the implications of that going to be?

John Jantsch (17:17.296)

Yeah,

John Jantsch (17:25.808)

Yeah. Or worse always tells you what you want to hear, which is, becomes an enabler rather than a therapist. So, so there are many, many ideas in this book that, uh, that we're not going to get to, um, because I want to veer off to like a really goofy thing that you did. Um, and, and that's the cover. Um, so, so talk a little bit. mean, it, it's obviously very on brand with the book, but, but.

MARK SCHAEFER (17:29.592)

Yeah.

MARK SCHAEFER (17:33.974)

Yeah. Yeah.

MARK SCHAEFER (17:47.687)

right.

John Jantsch (17:54.011)

explain the concept behind the cover.

MARK SCHAEFER (17:56.802)

Well, this is a first in the world book and I'm very proud of it actually because it sort of demonstrates the ideas in the book. And it demonstrates it in a powerful way because if you think about books have been published the same way for 200 years, it's almost impossible to disrupt a book. Believe me, I've tried. so this book, the cover of the book is a QR code. And what we did is,

John Jantsch (18:02.542)

Right.

John Jantsch (18:27.248)

For the video audience.

MARK SCHAEFER (18:27.306)

I uploaded. yeah, awesome. I uploaded the the book to a eye and uploaded some sort of generic art samples and a is generating. Abstract art interpretations of the stories in the book. So when you hover over the cover, it creates new covers endlessly.

based on the stories in the book. And we're actually updating it every week. So there's more and more stories that are possibilities for the cover. And people love it. It is different. And if you think about it, it's disrupted the story. It's disrupted where the story is told. It's disrupting who's telling the story. It's not even a human. And I'm getting feedback, that even children love

playing with the pictures on the book. So, yeah, so I'm very proud of that. And yeah, thanks for mentioning it.

John Jantsch (19:35.296)

You bet. let's wrap up today with like, if I'm listening to this and I'm thinking I need to do, I need to disrupt the narrative. What are like, what's like the, you know, everybody wants the, me the one thing I have to do. What's the one, two, three steps somebody ought to be doing right now to say, how do get ready for this?

MARK SCHAEFER (19:43.086)

Yeah.

MARK SCHAEFER (19:56.302)

Well, the one constant I saw in a lot of the creative thinking behind it is to start with wrong. And if you just sort of like think about iterating or changing a little bit, it doesn't really lead to creative thinking. And some of the best creative thinking comes from, let's flip the script and just look at what if everything was just wrong?

I I think the opportunity is this. If you look at most markets today, they're just dull. They're waiting to be disrupted. Every car commercial is the same. know, pizza, know, pizza is supposed to be fun and creative and the celebration. What's the most creative thing going on in pizza? In America, we have this ad, nobody out pizzas the hut. What in the world does that mean? Can't you do better than that? So look at, start with wrong.

That's where we got this US brand, Liquid Death. The number one lesson I ever learned in marketing class, never associate your brand with death, right? I mean, I encourage you to go to YouTube and Google some of their ads. They're shocking. They make you cringe. I actually was going to show an ad, one of their ads at a conference and it was turned down. They said, we can't show that. And it's a public ad.

John Jantsch (21:25.626)

Yeah.

MARK SCHAEFER (21:25.718)

Now, the guy who started that was not obsessed with water. He was obsessed with this idea of disrupting the market. And almost every market can be disrupted today because it's so boring, especially in B2B. So that would be one idea. But the book is filled with so many ideas. But that was definitely a common theme I heard in my research.

John Jantsch (21:46.735)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (21:53.87)

Yeah, yeah, I laugh. My kids love like, you know, their refrigerators are full of liquid death. I'm like.

MARK SCHAEFER (21:59.918)

It's just water!

John Jantsch (22:02.946)

Water! But I will say, you know, I mean, the message there is, you know, it's the brand. It's a connection to the brand. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Well, Mark, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there anywhere you'd invite people to connect with you and find out more about Audacious?

MARK SCHAEFER (22:12.814)

Fastest growing beverage brand in America. Yeah.

MARK SCHAEFER (22:26.282)

easy to find me. All you have to remember is businesses grow. That is my website. You can find my blog, my podcast, and my social media connections and the book we talked about today, Audacious, How Humans Win in an AI Marketing World.

John Jantsch (22:43.726)

Yeah, and it's Schaeffer with one A, two Es and one F. I mean, I have to look it up every time. I'm sorry. There's so many ways to spell Schaeffer.

MARK SCHAEFER (22:48.844)

Yeah. Well, the other day I was checking into a hotel. I said, name is Mark with a K. She said, your name is Cark?

MARK SCHAEFER (23:01.72)

So nobody can sell Mark, let alone Schaefer. So don't confuse him, John. Just go to Businesses Grow.

John Jantsch (23:08.088)

Okay. All right. Awesome. Again, it's so great to see you, my friend, and hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

MARK SCHAEFER (23:15.31)

Thank you, John.

Sara Nay (00:01.468)

Hello and welcome to the duct tape marketing podcast. This is your host, Sara and a today I'm stepping in for John Jance and I have a guest on the show, Dan Sanchez. So Dan is an AI marketer, consultant and creator with a passion of diving into the latest tech innovations. He specializes in developing cutting edge marketing strategies that leverage AI to enhance customer engagement and drive business growth. So welcome to the show, Dan.

Danchez (00:27.64)

Thanks for having me on, Sarah.

Sara Nay (00:28.978)

Of course, I'm excited to talk to you today. We first connected on LinkedIn because you had been posting about AI and thinking strategically about AI and speaking to marketers directly, which all of that resonates with me. But when I reached out to you, I was commenting about one of your posts and I'm just curious, do you remember what you said in response to my initial message to you? No, I put you on the spot.

Danchez (00:48.364)

I don't. If we're talking about the comments, I'm like, I don't know. I comment, I mean, I'm dropping 200 comments a day or a week on LinkedIn. And so they all blur together sometimes and I'm like, I don't know what I said, when I said it.

Sara Nay (00:56.36)

I'm sure.

No worries. Well, I sent you a direct message and you talked about how duct tape marketing was one of the initial blogs that you were following back when RSS feeds were a thing.

Danchez (01:02.882)

or the direct message. Yes, no.

That's right. It was Copy Blogger, Duct Tape Marketing, and Seth Godin were the three. I was transitioning from graphic design to being a marketer, and a marketing kind of mentor to me. He's like, hey, back when RSS was a thing too, he's like, go to create a Google feed account and subscribe to these three blogs. You need to read them every day. And so I did for a very long time.

Sara Nay (01:29.33)

I love it. just brought that up because I think it's very interesting. Like you've obviously been in the marketing space for a while now talking about RSS and original blogs. And now today the focus of this conversation is going to be all about AI. And so it's just interesting to think about the evolution that we've had over the last several years and the pace of the evolution that we're going through right now with all things AI. Well, great.

And that's what I want to dive into deeper. I've noticed through your posts and the content that you're putting out, you're talking a lot about approaching AI strategically to avoid overwhelm. at Duct Tape Marketing, we've been saying strategy before tactics for 20 years now. At this point, we're saying strategy before technology because you need to have a solid strategy in place. But I would love to open that up to you. How are you advising because it can be overwhelming with all the tools that are being developed and all the

the stuff that's being put out there on AI. So how do you advise people to approach the world of AI strategically?

Danchez (02:24.27)

You know, there's a couple different approaches, but it's funny because I just got a DM yesterday and it was like, hey man, heard you did a talk on the 25 new tools for AI in your session recently. What tools should I use? And I was like, I don't know, what problems are you facing? It's kind of like that whole strategy thing. It's kind of like, well, there's lots of tools. They can do lots of stuff. And there's some general purpose tools that can cover a lot of different things.

Sara Nay (02:44.892)

Yeah.

Danchez (02:51.822)

But what's the core obstacle you're running into your business with right now? Where's the choke point for your systems? What's causing you pain on a daily or weekly basis? Because those are the things I want to look for first as a consultant and see how AI might be able to help that. It's funny because a lot of times people actually don't need AI, they just need clarity and a strategic focus set. But I do find that AI is changing the game because it's allowing us

Sara Nay (03:00.774)

Yeah.

Danchez (03:20.982)

not only to automate and do things faster or even better, but it's helping us think better and more strategically if you kind of know how to use it as a co-pilot. So that's the first thing I'm kind of trying to help people understand is like this thing becomes a very good strategy thinking partner. Even if you can kind of, you just kind of have to give it a start. It's not going to proactively come after you and be like, Hey, so what's your plan for this? Hey, what's your strategy? Hey, what were you thinking here? But if you proactively ask it for feedback,

Sara Nay (03:26.93)

Mm.

Danchez (03:48.608)

or for considerations or ask questions that it can ask you and then give you feedback on, it's amazing how much more strategically you can think when you start using AI as a co-pilot.

Sara Nay (04:00.528)

Yeah, absolutely. And that was one of my early aha moments with AI is at first I was just using it or thinking about it as like a content creation tool. was thinking of it as something that like helps take stuff off my plate. But when I shifted to thinking of it as a thought partner and started using it in my strategic thinking and planning, like that's where my view on what AI can do completely changed. And I know you have a story that you talk about one of your early on experiences with chat, GBT, I think you call it your Mediterranean ice cream moment. Do you mind explaining what that experience was for you?

Danchez (04:26.838)

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it's when ChatGPT first came out. I'd been a huge skeptic of AI before ChatGPT came out. I'd seen some of the early pre-ChatGPT stuff like Jarvis, which was using its 2.5 API ChatGPTs back then. It was like a copywriting tool and I was like, okay, it's starting to get things. But when ChatGPT launched, it woke everybody up, including me. And I remember sitting there and being like, well, is this thing just really good at regurgitating?

You know, is it like, because remember before we had like Drift, you know, an AI chat bot and we had Intercom and like they were all pretty bad. None of them were good. So I was like, you know, can this come up with original ideas? Most original ideas are usually a combining of two different things that don't normally come together. And humans do it all the time to come up with new ideas. So was like, well, let's find something that doesn't exist on the internet and just ask for it to create something. So I figured recipes would be hard because I'm like, well, that's a whole different dimension. It's got to understand taste and

recipe and how things come together in order to form new flavors. That's pretty tough. And then I went searching, I'm like, what's a recipe that doesn't exist? So I just picked out two random flavors. I was like ice cream Mediterranean. I went and Google searched it. Could not find it. And then search and said, hey, make me a recipe for Mediterranean ice cream. And it punched out a bunch of ingredients. was like, you know what? This would actually work. And that's when I realized, I'm like, it has the ability to come up with new things.

If you're willing to guide it direct it and that changed everything for me because that was the missing piece That's what to me made it artificial intelligence is it was able to actually think through and come up with a very Kind of elaborate thing because making recipes is kind of hard if you're not pretty familiar with it And that was that was a big unlock for me

Sara Nay (06:07.035)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (06:10.812)

Did you try the recipe? Did you actually taste the ice cream?

Danchez (06:13.125)

No, no, no, I did not make the ice cream, but I remember looking at the ingredient list and thinking like that was workable. I wonder what else this can do. And then I moved on and started knocking out other ones, but that was the first big one. I was like, ah, this isn't just delivering something back. This isn't just summarizing what it's found. You can mash up new things with this together.

Sara Nay (06:19.3)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (06:32.038)

Yeah, that's great. Recently we have these big bushes in our backyard and they've been bothering us for years, but not enough to actually do something about it. And we finally decided to rip them out. And before like, I would have had to like go to gardening stores and figure out what to plant and like talk to a number of people and spend all this time like designing. But instead I took a picture and I put it into chat GPT and I asked like, you know, we're in Boise, Idaho and this full sun and all the things that I needed to know.

Danchez (06:57.485)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (07:00.254)

And I ended up like designing this whole space of plants to put in that, in that place. And while I was going through that experience, I had an aha moment of like my role, like problem solving has completely changed. Like how I go about problem solving is different because now what I need to get really good at is prompting AI to help me solve problems and to push it for like further and to redirect things versus before, you know, I was going out and doing all that stuff manually.

And so that was an example of just like an aha moment of like how I solve problems is completely different than it used to be.

Danchez (07:34.734)

you actually don't need to learn how to prompt AI as much as you'd think anymore. The AI models before you did because it was a little squirrely. Kind of like if you've done AI video right now, currently that is very squirrely, right? You try to prompt it and it's like, it's all over the place and the characters are disappearing and reappear and you're like, my gosh, I got to really hone this thing and get what I want. But it was like that in the beginning. Like it couldn't go that far without going off the rails in some way back in like 3.5 and early for chat GPT-4.

Sara Nay (07:43.196)

Yeah.

Danchez (08:03.182)

But nowadays it's gotten so good at anticipating what you want that I just talk to it like it's a person. I'm like, Hey, chat, you put interesting question for you. My dishwasher is not working and I've already tried to troubleshoot it through some YouTube videos, but it's just not working. here's, here's what I'm seeing. And here's what's happening. It's turning on, but it's flooding with water, but things aren't getting cleaned. I don't hear it running and it'll just start asking you questions and you just have.

Sara Nay (08:09.777)

Yeah.

Danchez (08:28.652)

dialogue with it, almost like it's an expert in your pocket. You can call up any time. And I was using the voice model as talking to it. but I find I'm doing it with like that all the time, whether I'm assessing my own strategic position in the market, whether I'm just asking to come up with a LinkedIn post. I'm just talking to it like it's an assistant that I just need to give us enough context in order to carry out the task.

Sara Nay (08:34.311)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (08:49.904)

Yeah, that's a great point. I've definitely seen it's improved drastically over the last year, I would say, in terms of not having to engineer as much with the prompting. I'm curious, we haven't shifted too much into the conversation of marketers. And so there's lot of unknown in a lot of industries, but marketing is obviously being deeply impacted. And you had a great LinkedIn post that went out this week that I saw about AI tools are potentially going to replace humans in the future. And so I would just love to hear your take on

To the marketers that are listening to this, what do they need to be thinking of moving forward in their roles as marketers? Is there an opportunity to evolve and shift? Or what do you recommend for those that are feeling a little bit uncertain about the industry that we're in right now?

Danchez (09:33.036)

There is a lot of uncertainty. And I tried to think about the uncertainty in scenario planning methods, where it's like, OK, let's say it is like we're going to lose 90 % of marketing jobs. You're like, well, who are the 10 % that do have jobs? And what do I need to be in that 10 %? So I think about it like that. But I think about on the other side, let's say this is going to be like every other technology revolution. Well, there's going to be a whole ton of new jobs that exist.

Sara Nay (09:34.695)

Yeah.

Danchez (10:01.09)

What's gonna be in those new jobs? Well, they're probably all gonna be AI driven. So in either scenario, it's probably going to be who's me to become AI driven, right? And it's probably gonna land somewhere in between. It's probably not gonna be like this glorious thing. There's probably gonna be good, there's gonna be bad, there's gonna be some loss on some side. I did recently post because a lot of people, there's been this trending topic on LinkedIn that I really had an epiphany. like, you know, it's not gonna be all that.

Kind of like this idea that like human first is going to be the one that powers it. Like AI frees us up to do the more human things. And I'm like, that be true. There will certainly be a place where a lot of companies lean into being more human, more service oriented. And those will be great and they'll win. There will be a whole nother set of businesses that win from just being more fully automated because somehow through AI, they create systems that deliver more value at just a much lower price. And you know what people, a lot of people will do that.

Like it used to be that you'd have a tax filer help you file your taxes and almost everybody's using TurboTax now, right? Unless you have a company in some kind of more complicated tax situation and you are hiring a CPA, but I'd still be even a little nervous to be a CPA right now, unless you're like a really good one, you know? So I think a lot of businesses will be automated and there'll be people that go into the whole all human thing and the cost difference between the two will probably be pretty dramatic, but there will be a lot of ways to win. But I think...

Sara Nay (10:57.607)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (11:11.824)

Yeah. Yeah.

Danchez (11:25.89)

What will help the most is trying to figure out what different paths will happen in the future and then finding the common denominator around them. The common denominator I'm seeing is that AI skills are going to be a big piece of it.

Sara Nay (11:39.952)

Yeah, absolutely. I heard someone talk recently about if you're a marketer, really anyone in a role is basically writing down everything that you're working on on a regular basis and then doing a bit of audit on that work saying, like, is this increasing in value because of AI? Is this decreasing in value because of AI or is this staying consistent moving forward? And so if you thought about anything like that, auditing your time and your skill sets to see what you should continue to leverage and grow on versus maybe start delegating the different tools and solutions.

Danchez (12:09.336)

For me, it's probably a little harder because I'm an AI educator. like I, I, for my job, I literally get to waste some time experimenting and using these things so that I can report on whether it's actually helpful or not. I find the process of auditing on a regular basis to be pretty burdensome. I'm like, like, I wish I would just like audit my days more. In fact, I've even thought about going into making a project in chat GPT to be like,

Sara Nay (12:12.294)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (12:28.144)

Yeah. Yeah.

Danchez (12:36.642)

here's what I thought I would get done, here's what I didn't get done, here's some extra stuff and just dictate into it real quick to kind of keep like a daily journal and kind of a little bit of a coach. It's gotten way better at that recently. But it's, I don't know, I don't think I would do that. I think on larger projects, I think it's really helpful, especially if you can bring some of that data back into AI because it's learning now and can remember things across different chats now and it will get better over time. I think that will become a strategic advantage. But yeah, I...

for anything new in businesses, you do have to start small and kind of test your way there. I will say it is probably like, there's enough effort and a momentum in society going towards AI, especially with businesses right now that I promise it's worth at least just going deep into chat GPT. It's the main one. And I heard somebody say even recently like, like I know chat GPT, but like I want to go beyond beginner. And I'm like, no, like trust me, all the pros are using chat GPT too.

Sara Nay (13:08.764)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (13:29.308)

Hmm.

Danchez (13:31.958)

Like if anything, they're only spending more time in that tool because they're finding it more and increasingly valuable. Just don't waste time learning all the tools. Like literally learn that one. And then if you have time and you have a need, start learning some of the other ones. But time spent learning how to leverage Chat GPT specifically. And if you like Claude, go with Claude or Jim and I. Like pick one of the main ones and then just hone in that one craft in order to make the most of it.

Sara Nay (13:58.074)

Yeah, that's how my brain works with it all as well. Like I've gone all in on chat, GBT, and that's where I typically live every day. but I know other people out there, they're like, I use this for this, this for this. And I'm like, how do you have time for all of those things? Like I have to go deep in one to actually be able to use it to some of its potential versus, know, going through all the different tools. So I think that's great advice. I'm curious, I'm part of a mastermind and AI mastermind. And were talking last week about how

Danchez (14:09.442)

Yeah, I don't know.

Sara Nay (14:24.614)

websites and marketing in general is going to have to shift because of the AI agents world. Where right now we're designing websites for humans and ads for humans and eventually, you know, it might be agents going to these different websites to make buying decisions for their people. And so have you thought or talked much about how marketing might shift in the next, I would say six months to a year with the idea of agents becoming more of a thing or more of a focus?

Danchez (14:52.13)

Yeah, I've thought about it a lot. I don't think it's going to change much in the next six months. AI agents, in my opinion, they're just not a thing right now for the most part. we're calling, what most agents are, or what are labeled as agents, they're not agents. There's a few exceptions, and I'll talk about those in a second, but most agents are what I'm calling intelligent automation. They are just automated sequences, like we had before with marketing automation, know, like the little drag and drop builders. They're just that.

Sara Nay (15:00.455)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (15:13.906)

Mm.

Sara Nay (15:18.257)

Yep.

Danchez (15:20.086)

with one of the modules being ChatGBT. That's it. Some of them are slightly more sophisticated because you're giving a little bit of autonomy to AI to choose between a few different tools and maybe it's not injecting a prompt, it's actually got access to a database. that's starting to feel more agentic, but it's not like this fully autonomous thing that can go out shopping for us. It's just not. Now there's some precursor tools out there that you're like, that's definitely agent-ish.

but they're not good yet. OpenAI has operator baked into chat GPT. You gotta pay the $200 a month license to get access to it. It doesn't work well. Manus is the big one people are talking about from China. It also doesn't work well. There's just too many holes in the system. It maxes out too often because the server space isn't ready. The memory isn't ready. We have all the ingredients to make agents right now, but we're still...

The cost of compute needs to come down a little bit. The context window needs to go up a little bit. We need to be able to give it more access to more things. know, all these, there's a lot of talk right now about giving it access to like, Google just launched its agent to agent framework so that it can interface, different tools can interface. Agents can work with other agents from other tools. You know, like these kinds of standards and models have to be developed to create the infrastructure for it to happen. Right now, it's not happening. The one agent that I've seen that is actually good,

It's agentic and it's worth, it's like one of the most underutilized AI features out there right now is deep research. It is going and doing a lot of work. And I love it. The more I use it, the more I fall in love with it. If you're a chat GPT user now, you're paying for plus and you're not using all 10 of the instances of that you get every single month. You haven't figured it out yet. I promise the best advice I give is like upgrade just for one month, upgrade to the $200 a month one. So you can get 120 instances of it.

Sara Nay (16:49.744)

Yes.

Danchez (17:12.462)

and just throw everything you can at it, practice at it. You get 120 of them, like throw away things at it and just try it. It's different than using chat GPT because it's going and doing like 20 to 40 hours worth of human work for you, which means you kind of, like I said, prompting wasn't good a minute ago, but for deep research, prompting actually is more strategic because it's less of a prompt and more of like a mini project charter if you think about it.

Sara Nay (17:18.545)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (17:36.294)

Mm-hmm.

Danchez (17:37.676)

you kind of need to put some barriers on like where you want it to go, what you want it to do, what you want it to accomplish, where you want it to not go before you give it 40 hours of work. Even though it's doing it in 20 minutes, you got to remember these reports are so sophisticated. You're like, that would have taken a human a long time. But that's the most agentic thing that I've seen out there. That's remarkably good right now.

Sara Nay (17:46.649)

Yeah, yeah.

Sara Nay (18:00.004)

Yeah, I use deep research a lot for things like competitive research if we're working with a client or if I'm creating a new presentation and I want some data to like back it up, I'll have it create initial research to put together that. I'm curious, do you have any other examples of how people might start wrapping their head around using deep research?

Danchez (18:18.796)

out a few. There's one prompt that I fell in love with and it went like super viral on LinkedIn. It's like my most viral post to date was a deep research prompt and it's really useful. So it is, I will give it to you to script out. I'm not going to read the whole thing because it's kind of long, but I'll give it to you. You can put it in the show notes, okay? But it's essentially a prompt that goes and collects all the questions your audience is asking about your expertise, okay? And it goes and searches Reddit.

Quora, forums, and social to go and find them all and then organize them into categories and then rank stack them so that you can get at a glance, what are the most frequently asked questions your audience is asking about the thing that you do or the thing that you sell, whatever category that is. And that's just so helpful to see. And it actually like not only rank stacks it, but actually gives you a header for each one and then put bullet points of the exact how they're wording the questions with the link to the source so you can spot check it.

It's so helpful because as a content marketer, it's a lot of things are still done by content, right? Like that's like my planning path. I don't, I used to have to just have a lot of conversations on social or put out polls or just talk to a lot of customers. Now I can just extract it from the internet in 15 minutes and have a pretty dang good path of like what I need to be talking about on social or on podcasts or blogs.

Sara Nay (19:42.226)

That's amazing. It was a great example. We've, this isn't a deep research thing, but it's chat GPT thing. We've started recording a lot of our sales calls and that's just been really great content to put into GPT as well to analyze not only from a, can our sales team be doing better, but also a marketing content perspective, because now we're capturing exactly, as you said, exactly how prospects phrase certain pain points and things they're struggling with. And then we're able to create marketing content that speaks directly to them moving forward.

So I love that example. All right, Dan. Yeah, give me one more. Give me one more.

Danchez (20:13.922)

I got one more for deep research, unless you want to wrap up. Because the deep research prompts are a little bit more sophisticated, something I've started doing is if I want to use a deep research prompt to dive deep, and maybe I'm thinking about launching a new product, or I'm about to do something big, and I don't want to just do it willy nilly, I want to have a substantial conversation with AI about it, I will start it off in 4.0, just talk about, hey, this is what I want to accomplish. Help me build a prompt that would do really well in Chet GPT's deep research.

ask me some questions. This takes time. I'll tell it generally what I'm going after. It'll ask me some questions, get clarity. It'll craft the prompt. Then I'll switch it to the O1 Pro model within that same window or the O1 thinking model. And then on deep research, I'm like, hey, that prompt above, go and do your thing. It's like, because it's already crafted the prompt for me. Then it'll go do the deep research, come back with the refindings. I'll read it and switch it back to 4.0 or maybe even a different thinking model.

Sara Nay (21:02.556)

Go do it. Yeah.

Danchez (21:12.238)

depending on what you're going after, and then have a conversation about the research and pick it apart. But now it's got this like big research report in there that then you can have a conversation with AI to be like, okay, well, it looks like this, like, what do you think? And then you can have a conversation and dialogue about the research, which is kind of a fun way to do it is chat GPT, deep research, and then going back to talking to chat GPT about it after the deep research report.

Sara Nay (21:15.952)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (21:36.508)

Yeah, that's really interesting because you're using it in that sense in that example as a research assistant with the deep research. And then you're going into more of the thought partner co-pilot mode when you're going into conversation. Very cool. Well, thanks, Dan. Is there anything else that you want to share before we part ways today in terms of anything on the topic of AI overwhelm and strategic thinking?

Danchez (21:43.02)

back into copilot mode. Yeah.

Danchez (21:57.294)

For anybody that's listening to this and thinking they're behind on the AI train, you're not behind. It's still very, very early. I promise. I've just got back from a conference just two weeks ago. People were asking all kinds of questions and I could tell just from the types of questions and their hunger they had that this is still extremely early. Like it is not too late. I know the hype has been crazy over the last two years, but as far as marketers actually using it in a meaningful way on a weekly or daily basis, very few. So.

It generally pays to be early on these trends, but don't be overwhelmed with trying everything. Just taking some of the things we've talked about in this episode and practicing it and finding use cases that are meaningful for you. Again, look for those daily or weekly things you use all the time and start experimenting with AI and count it and write it off as like education time rather than, I wasn't as productive as I was hoping it would be. Your first couple of swings at it are just going to take time. It took us all time to learn how to Google. It took us all time to learn how to actually write our first blog post.

It'll take you time with AI, but it's early and putting in the reps now will pay dividends later.

Sara Nay (23:00.402)

Yeah, that's great advice. I always like to think we're all learning together right now on this. We're all learning together. Well, where can people connect with you online, Dan?

Danchez (23:04.12)

That's right.

Danchez (23:08.648)

You can find my podcast wherever podcasts are, AIDrivenMarketer.com. Sorry, it's anywhere you search AIDrivenMarketer.com on any podcast app. It's also on YouTube. It's a video podcast. And LinkedIn at LinkedIn.com slash ian slash digital marketing Dan is my most active social network.

Sara Nay (23:27.026)

Awesome. Thank you so much for being here, Dan, and thank you all for listening to another episode of the Duck Tape Marketing Podcast. We will see you next time.

John Jantsch (00:00.923)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Keith Lover. He is a serial entrepreneur and marketing expert who has founded six companies, raised over $34 million for product launches and now leads Atomic Elevator. His team specializes in product launch support and created Ella, a pioneering tool for high-definition marketing.

He started his entrepreneurial journey at 14. He secured clients like Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, and inspires others as a speaker and mentor. We were just talking about it. He lives in Red Lodge, Montana, active community in community service through Young Life. So Keith, welcome to the show.

Keith Lauver (00:44.526)

Thanks so much, John. Good beer.

John Jantsch (00:46.172)

So what did you do at 14?

Keith Lauver (00:48.026)

my gosh. So I had the opportunity to, build a software platform for an airport in Billings. was painting pipes in the summer and they found out I knew something about computers. And during the regular smoke break time, I started creating a database to keep track of the paper towels and other inventory got invited upstairs. That turned into an invitation to build the software.

John Jantsch (00:56.883)

Ha

John Jantsch (01:09.907)

Ha

Keith Lauver (01:14.862)

And apparently KPMG had offered him a bid for about $20,000. I said I'll do it for two and they took it. So that was the very first commercial client I had.

John Jantsch (01:26.547)

Well, I think I started my first business when was 16. It was not nearly as glamorous. I was going door to door convincing people to let me seal their driveway. I paid my way through high school and college doing similar things.

Keith Lauver (01:32.723)

my gosh.

Keith Lauver (01:38.016)

That's.

Keith Lauver (01:44.072)

I think the idea of asphalt going down and paint going up, we do what we have to do. I just caught a lucky break that day, right?

John Jantsch (01:47.347)

So we, we're going to talk about, AI a lot today. I think, it's a hot topic. It's probably the hottest topic going right now. I, have, in fact, I've started a group I call practical AI for marketing. because I think it's just a lot of, with any technology, there's all this futuristic talk of what it can do.

or what it, you know, is going to do someday. And I really liked always bring it down to, okay, that's great, but what should it do? So in terms of, of your conversations with smaller businesses, how do you help them see the practical uses of AI and not sort of the robots running the world, you know, future.

Keith Lauver (02:25.271)

Yeah

Keith Lauver (02:40.046)

You know, one of things that I like to do is separate the application side of things from the construction side of things. And I think there's a lot of people that are confused about that, John. think, you know, I'm reminded of a workshop that was being done for business owners in Montana a couple of weeks ago, and they brought in a prompt engineer and machine learning expert for the day to teach them how to do stuff that most of them really didn't care about and frankly didn't understand.

John Jantsch (03:06.557)

Right?

Keith Lauver (03:08.738)

that that was what was going to be the topic. So don't think people even know what this beast called AI is. So there's people who are building tools and then there's people who are actually using tools. And those two probably need to be separated before I could even answer the next part of your question.

John Jantsch (03:25.029)

Yeah. Well, first off, then let's back up a little bit. What percentage of businesses, business owners, people working for businesses, do you think are actually using even a simple interface like chat GPT?

Keith Lauver (03:37.888)

I think every business owner I've talked to has at least experimented with and tried chat GPT. When we take forms on our website, we ask them how frequently are they using it? And I would say that probably a quarter of them aren't using it more than once a week. And that's surprising to me. They still haven't found that thing. And if I might offer a hypothesis about why, I think we are used to something like Google where

John Jantsch (03:55.847)

Yeah, yeah.

Keith Lauver (04:06.978)

You type in a search and a computer gives an answer. And AI's potential is so much different than that. But most people are sitting down and thinking about this as a search tool and maybe a little bit smarter search tool. And they're just not sure what's beyond that even at the application layer.

John Jantsch (04:25.757)

So one of the things that, I don't know, I, you you talked about bringing in this, large language model expert to talk about things and like that just goes nowhere with the business owners. So I'm going to bring up agents, which, know, maybe we have to kind of break down a little bit, but that's one of the areas where people are like the future's coming. You're going to have, you know, agents replacing all of your people. We don't actually have agents yet. Not really.

because there's a lot of things that I think are going to happen, over, mean, I think we're going to have some simple task bots. but, but, but the one that people throw out, tell your agent to book me the best ticket on this flight, you know, blah, blah, blah. Well, they've got to have access to all the data, all the airline things. And those people aren't going to share that information. Or if they do some big tech company, it'll be the one that does the interface and we'll just be a product of theirs like Facebook.

Keith Lauver (05:20.994)

Okay.

John Jantsch (05:23.973)

and not, not a user. talk, I just went and rambled all over the place there, but talk a little bit about, you know, the, the, where we are now with agents, what agents are, guess, where we are now and really what is going to be a hurdle to this large scale adoption.

Keith Lauver (05:41.516)

Yeah. So as I understand and use agents, they basically are bots, you will, programs that can perform a discrete task and do so in repetition and kind of string those tasks, perhaps one to another, to another. And instead of like right now, if you sit down and chat GPT and say, Hey,

John Jantsch (05:49.203)

you

Keith Lauver (06:02.926)

you know, can you give me input about a story or can you review this website and tell me the pros and the cons of it or whatever the query might be, an agent can actually do something that's much more complex and a series of steps. So it might be, can you build me an entire website? Right? And step one is this and step two is this and step three, I think where agents are today,

John Jantsch (06:18.621)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Keith Lauver (06:27.538)

is still very much in the experimental world. I love the fact that as a company that's created a platform, we now can begin to move our entire architecture into what they're calling agentic. So we're able to take what we were finding other ways of doing and we can now do it better and easier because most of the things that we need to have done are complex and require more than one step and agents will help us do that.

John Jantsch (06:40.883)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (06:53.757)

Yeah, no, there'll be a lot of stringing these things together too, right? You complete this task and then go give your output to this agent who then has been trained to do X, right? I mean, is that kind of another way to look at it?

Keith Lauver (06:57.55)

for sure.

Keith Lauver (07:02.487)

Yeah.

I love that vision, John, that really interoperability of agents. It's like, why not have the thing that's really good at X talk to the other thing that's really good at Y and talk to the other thing that's really good at Z. In the field of marketing, of the analog metaphor, if you will, would be the branding person who just is the wizard in the marketing world, right? They're able to just say, this is the emotional state that we're going to evoke for people.

John Jantsch (07:12.179)

Right.

John Jantsch (07:31.123)

Mm-hmm.

Keith Lauver (07:34.254)

pontificate on that. And then you've got the designer who tries to interpret that. And then you've got the copywriter who actually puts words to it. And then you've got the HTML person who has to construct it. And then maybe you've got somebody that needs to be the messaging architect that's thinking about it. And then the performance person, we get all these different things. Wouldn't it be great if those could all be strung together?

John Jantsch (07:56.731)

Yeah. And I think that's a, maybe that's a little bit of the dilemma of how people, when they're thinking about embracing AI in general is that, you know, one, one vision I've seen is, the org chart that has maybe those, those analog managers, if you will, is that what we're to call people now? Analog managers. but that, but then each of those people will have three agents that help them do their function.

Keith Lauver (08:14.83)

I hope so.

John Jantsch (08:24.371)

and they've all been maybe specifically trained on a thing, but then I've also seen people say, no, we're going to have, we're going to have the data analysis agent. That's going to go across department. you know, how do you, how do you see the org chart of the future?

Keith Lauver (08:39.266)

You know, I think, the org chart of the future is probably going to be as diverse as organizations of the future. think models, what's beautiful about what's happening in this world is the models can be completely novel. can create things that have never before been seen. An example is, you know, we have been building our go-to-market plans using our software itself. We haven't needed really a marketing department. even haven't had to do.

John Jantsch (08:40.305)

Peace.

John Jantsch (08:56.466)

Yes.

Keith Lauver (09:08.352)

advertising in a traditional way. Most of our team is fully fractional and we can all cooperate and actually perform at a much higher level for a lot less money. And I don't even know what an org chart is. We had a potential investor asked us to build one and I'm like, we haven't, we don't even have one for our company. It's just not the way we operate. We kind of collect around tasks and bring expertise to those tasks and then perform those tasks.

So it's just a very different organizational model that we've chosen. And I think there's a lot of freedom in how people are going to build the company.

John Jantsch (09:43.827)

But see, I hear an org chart in there. It's just way different than anything we've been taught. So I think it's still, because an org chart to me is not people doing jobs. An org chart is what functions need to be done. And so I think that's kind of what you're describing, but we're all just used to this is our head of that and this is our VP of that. And I think that that whole, that's what's interesting about it. think what's going on is it's not just like,

Keith Lauver (09:48.878)

Yeah, yeah.

Keith Lauver (09:57.516)

Ooh, I love that. Different, yeah.

John Jantsch (10:13.405)

How do we augment what we're already doing? It's how do we rethink everything, right?

Keith Lauver (10:18.772)

I love the freedom. think the moment, when we accidentally discovered this idea that turned into this platform for marketing, call Ella, when this was not an intentional discovery, it was pure accident. And in that moment, every single neuron in my brain fired every pattern from that 14 year old kid who wrote the software for that airport and Billings to the guy who'd been a student of marketing for the last decade fired and said, wait a minute.

I can do this differently now and I can ask this question in this way and get a completely different perspective than the old model was go to the expert. If we invert and put all the experts into a model, it shifts and everything changes. And I'm addicted to that innovation. So I think it's wonderful.

John Jantsch (11:07.633)

Yeah. Yeah. So, one of the certainly themes that is prevalent is that this technology is going to replace a lot of people. mean, every technology does, right? I mean, or at least changes, you know, what those people do. Where do you fall on kind of the, it's going to revolutionize industries, replace a lot of people, augment, you know, lot of the value we can bring. I mean, where do you fall on that?

Keith Lauver (11:20.814)

you

John Jantsch (11:37.867)

continue.

Keith Lauver (11:39.342)

So yes, yes, and yes. I do think that AI is going to transform, to augment, to replace. But I don't think that changes our sense of self. I don't think that changes our value of fact. If anything, for me, what it's done is created more freedom around that. I talked to so many people on our team. We're avid minute by minute users of AI.

John Jantsch (11:41.391)

Yeah, OK.

John Jantsch (11:50.034)

Yeah.

Keith Lauver (12:08.974)

We're more confident in what we can do and in the gifts that we've been created to bring to the world because we augment the things that maybe we're not as good at. I'm a visionary, I'm not an integrator. So I see big ideas and when you ask me to actually turn that into a you know, a set of sequential steps, I just, my brain hurts. I don't like that work and I don't have to do that work anymore. So.

John Jantsch (12:13.939)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (12:35.795)

Yeah. Peace.

Keith Lauver (12:36.246)

I think it's not replacing people, but it's replacing some of the things that we as people have done. And what that does is gives us the freedom to go back to what is our zone of genius? What is our superpower? What is it that we love to do? And I don't think AI will ever replace humanity. I think it's just bringing us up to be the very best versions of ourselves.

John Jantsch (12:41.317)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (12:57.395)

Well, it's interesting because I certainly, I've always, you know, from a marketing standpoint, we've, our monitor has always been strategy before tactics. Um, and I think that in a lot of ways that makes the strategic thinker who can also master AI, who also understands marketing operations. That's the job of the future, isn't it? As opposed to the agency that comes in and does the stuff.

Keith Lauver (13:22.06)

I think that's right. I would say our focus has actually been trying to go in and provide even greater effectiveness and efficiency for the strategists. And so because of that, I see a world where AI can actually do a lot of the strategy when well-guided and augmented by humans through that. I would say for me, as I've contemplated kind of my own work shift in the last, say, year, most of my time is now relational.

And that can't ever be replaced by AI. Most of my time is getting to understand people and their problems and then finding a way to bring that in. But I'm not spending time on strategies so much as I am building relationships that allow my tools to build that strategy. So I think that's a higher level.

John Jantsch (14:12.413)

Yeah.

Well, there's such a, even though it's more one-to-one, there is such a brand aspect to that. There is such a trust aspect to that. And I think that those are the things that are really going to allow the, if there's going to be winners and losers, I think people that get that, think are going to side on the win.

Keith Lauver (14:23.063)

Ooh, I love that. Yeah.

Keith Lauver (14:33.326)

You know what I love about what you said there too is just kind of reminds me of the benefit to AI in getting us out of ourselves that if we're going to be able to establish trust, one of the ways that I do this today that I did in 12 months ago is I talk about the fact that I run everything I do through a blind spot and a bias detector. I run everything I do through the lens of our software.

that can look at 100 different marketing people's perspectives. And that actually increases my trustworthiness, my credibility with somebody because I'm actually admitting my own limitations.

John Jantsch (15:05.811)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (15:16.339)

Yeah, yeah, that's one of my favorite prompts is like, what should I be asking you? Or what am I not asking you? You know, that kind of thing, you know, or, or I sometimes have to say, stop agreeing with me. That's a brilliant idea.

Keith Lauver (15:24.43)

Yeah.

Yes. I like to think that my AI is sometimes a little bit too puppy-like. You know, it just wants to wag its tail and say, yes, Keith, I love you. Will you rub my belly? It's like, yeah. Exactly. It's like, no, no, no. Or even when I ask AI to be to go do something and the end result, if I say, is this biased? And she says, yes. I'm like, well, why did you do that in that way in the first place? So.

John Jantsch (15:54.021)

Right. So, so, I have one more question, but I really do want, we haven't, I want to spend some time on what you're doing specifically with Ella because it relates to everything we're talking about. But, one of the things that, anybody who says the five things that are coming this year, you know, personalization in marketing is, certainly a buzzword that's going to be on that list all the time. is, is, and it seems AI can help that.

But I also don't see a lot of people doing it yet. And is the real missing ingredient is it can't personalize without access to data.

Keith Lauver (16:33.304)

think that's a great insight. think I would challenge how much data we can give it access to. would say in general, I'll give you an example. I love what there's a tool called Crystal Nose has done, which is they've used AI to go, you know, essentially determine somebody's personality. And that gives you a degree of personalization to present information in a particular style. So for example, anytime I do a sales follow-up,

I run it first through Crystal and I have Ella rewrite it to that person's disc profile. And that gives me a level of personalization that's not just this was the conversation we had, but this is who you are and how you probably prefer to receive information. So I think we're getting closer to it.

John Jantsch (17:17.169)

Yeah. Yeah. And it might just be bullet points and short sentences as opposed to, you know, necessarily, hi, John. Exactly. Right. Right. So talk a little bit about Ella. If somebody came to you and said, what's Ella?

Keith Lauver (17:26.321)

Yes. Exactly. These are the three things we talked about. Sign here.

Keith Lauver (17:38.86)

Yeah, so we describe Ella as a high definition marketing machine. And the reason that we've chosen to describe her that way is we have found as professional marketers that most marketing has historically been very fuzzy. The fuzziness has been caused by specializations and fragmentation, right? The fuzziness has been caused by shifts in tactics and expectations. And the fuzziness is the fact that at the end of the day,

Most marketing is really a hypothesis that needs to be tested out there anyway. So it's social science, it's behavioral science. And so what we've said is let's try to provide more pixels to the picture. Let's take frameworks and connect them. Let's take pictures and define them in greater resolution. Let's interconnect them so that when somebody says, I want to talk to John about duct tape marketing,

John Jantsch (18:10.515)

Yeah.

Keith Lauver (18:34.37)

they're able to do so with just a high degree of precision. So Ella is a tool that enables better messaging, more discrete personas, and essentially better results because of this high definition process.

John Jantsch (18:49.907)

Yeah, boy, will say, you you used a fate, one of my favorite words, frameworks. Um, you know, one of the best things you can do if you're trying to get some sort of output out of, uh, out of an AI tool is, is to say, use this framework, uh, that's well-defined. think at least it gives it some guardrails to say, okay, you know, I'm not just going to write something that hopefully sounds good. You're going to write something that.

Keith Lauver (19:04.216)

Yes.

John Jantsch (19:14.875)

maybe is using a proven framework. And so it's going to be more effective right off the bat, whether or not the outputs, know, word for word, what you're going to use, at least the structure will be there.

Keith Lauver (19:18.093)

Yeah.

Keith Lauver (19:25.538)

Yeah, I think frameworks, you know, I got drawn into the idea of frameworks because I was a computer guy who fell into the field of marketing, right? I'm used to here is a subroutine. If you're going to tell a story, here's seven blanks to fill in. Donald Miller, thank you for giving me the seven blanks to fill in. Like I need that kind of thing. And what has been true about all the frameworks, at least that I've experienced is while fantastic, they've always been discreet.

John Jantsch (19:32.541)

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (19:44.381)

Yes, exactly.

Keith Lauver (19:55.008)

and probably more unitaskers. So they're fantastic for one thing, but they are often missing another thing. And what, least in my mind has been the missing link to all of this is a unifying, almost marketing operating system that pulls all those frameworks together. And that's the big aspiration for what we're trying to build.

John Jantsch (19:59.675)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (20:16.817)

Now, are you staying very focused on the niche market of, and I thought I read this, of SaaS go to market, or are really putting yourself out there as any type of business or industry?

Keith Lauver (20:27.21)

yeah.

Keith Lauver (20:31.756)

Yeah, we started in the field of SaaS. Obviously, we are too a SaaS product and understand those frameworks very well. But as Ella has so quickly grown, people are contributing their own frameworks. We've got authors who are saying, use mine. Or we've got practitioners who say, have you heard about this amazing system called duct tape? And I'm like, yes. Yes, I have. And so we're trying to integrate those. And so

John Jantsch (20:36.147)

Sure.

John Jantsch (20:47.251)

Sure. Right.

John Jantsch (20:52.999)

Hehehehehe

Keith Lauver (20:58.988)

The idea of Ella is she can help with B2B, B2C, really across industries. And she's getting smarter every single time somebody uses her and at least volunteers their feedback to Ella.

John Jantsch (21:13.619)

So one question that comes up a lot of times and will probably be continued to be debated forever, but are there privacy concerns? You know, I'm sharing all of my personal company data. that something or, or, you know, as an agency, I'm sharing my clients data. Is that an issue with a model like, or a tool like Ella?

Keith Lauver (21:36.64)

It is an issue for all AI and Ella has decided to respond to that with kind of a very clear privacy policy, a very clear non-disclosure agreement that we enter into, and also very clear technical parameters where we have opted out underlying our tool is OpenAI, but we have basically disallowed OpenAI from using any prompt

for training purposes, any prompt for storage purposes. And so we can say with confidence that we are protecting the confidentiality of that information. And I think it is important that we do that.

John Jantsch (22:15.461)

Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's going to be, you know, a raging debate for some time. And I think we'll end up having, won't we end up having the same thing that happened to the search engines, that, you know, the, the, all the privacy and all the stuff that they're, they've been doing and not telling anybody. We'll, we'll come back to in lawsuits probably.

Keith Lauver (22:35.31)

I am excited to see how intellectual property will continue to evolve around all of this. But in the meantime, we're going to let people do great work and keep what they're doing private.

John Jantsch (22:38.291)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (22:47.155)

Well, Keith, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there someplace you'd send folks to learn more about Atomic Elevator and your work?

Keith Lauver (22:56.652)

You bet, AtomicElevator.com and we've got free trials available. We'd love to sign up anybody. Let them take Elifer spin for a couple of weeks and see what kind of impact you can make for their clients.

John Jantsch (23:08.627)

Again, appreciate you taking a moment and maybe I'll run into you one of these days next time I'm up in Montana.

Keith Lauver (23:15.713)

I hope that would be the case.