Speaker 1: (00:00)

Fix the hair. Got it.

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Speaker 2: (00:03)

Hi, I am Kevin Lee with the e-Marketing Association. Uh, most of my day I spend running did it, uh, 50 plus person digital marketing agency that actually does traditional as well. We've made a bunch of acquisitions. We mail millions of pieces of direct mail with custom QR codes on them, uh, to turn out Glen Gary leads, which is sort of fun. Uh, I have my own brand truth nutrition that I use to run marketing experiments on, and I run a nonprofit giving forward in the cost marketing category. Uh, one of the hot topics, obviously for the last couple of years is, is AI and certainly social media and content creation are at the top of everybody's mind as is SEO. So I'm super excited to be chatting, uh, with Kate Bradley Chars, who founded lately.ai, uh, and is sort of, you know, found the need to sort of jump into the fray along with all the other AI companies, but in the content arena. So Kate, what was, what was the catalyst for you saying, you know, I, this needs to be done my way, the way I'm imagining it, and no one else is going to do it that way?

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Speaker 1: (01:04)

Yeah. Um, well, thank you so much, Kevin. Hi, everybody. Um, you know, so I'm an OG of ai. I founded lately 10 years ago. So in fact, 2014 was when generative AI was born to the world. So we were right on the same deadline, uh, or at the same timeline. Uh, at the time though, I didn't actually know that what we were building was ai. It wasn't what we had set out to do. And in the process, um, one of a mentor eventually came along and said, Hey, , let me introduce you to some people so you can, you know, learn more about, you know, what, what you're doing here. But for us, the journey all started from radio. Um, so I think you know about this, about me, but I'm not sure I, so I used to be a rock and roll dj, and my last gig was broadcasting to 20 million listeners a day at SiriusXM.

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Speaker 1: (01:57)

And that's pertinent because I was really interested there in the theater of the mind, right? So just refresh any younger listeners. Back in the day, Radio was a big deal, you know, was what we had. Um, and you couldn't Google people. You didn't know what they looked like. And so the theater of the mind was the act of having your imagination fill in the blanks. You know, maybe you didn't have the album art yet, so you're thinking about the music in a different way. You're listening to the dj, everything was this kind of soundscape going on, and it was very exciting. Um, 'cause there was, you know, not so many channels on tv, let's say. Um, but you would have this same experience in reading, right, Kevin? So you read your favorite book and then you go see the movie and you're kind of off unless it's Dune because it doesn't really convey what you had imagined in your mind, right?

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Speaker 1: (02:48)

Um, and that's because that imaginative experience is so powerful. And what I learned was that when the imagination kicks in for Theater of the Mind, it's tugging on nostalgia and memory and emotion to help you sort of not only fill in the blank, but to give you ownership in the story. And that was fascinating because we had listeners that, so many listeners that thought I was talking to them directly, they felt this ownership, right? And I was like, well, what, what is this parallel between wielding the mic and wielding the pen? And it was kind of creepy sometimes, frankly, you know. Um, but I read a book by Daniel Leviton called, this Is Your Brain On, on Music. So diving into the neuroscience of music listening, and guess what? When your brain listens to a new song, it must instantly access every other song you've ever heard.

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Speaker 1: (03:41)

And in this moment, it's running down all these familiar touchpoints, so it knows where to index that new song in the library of the memory of your brain. And as it does that, it's tugs on nostalgia and memory and emotion. And I was like, okay, I am right. There is a connection. And so then it occurred to me, all right, well when Kevin writes me an email or a text or anything, I'm gonna read that text and hear his voice in my mind, in his voice like a song. 'cause both are sounds and both have frequencies. So his voice, I'm gonna hear his voice in my head. And so if Kevin is really good at writing, he'll think, ah, I have a way to cue nostalgia and memory and emotion in the reader here and make sure they feel that connection, that two-way street instead of a one-way street.

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Speaker 1: (04:34)

Right? Some kind of that valuable thing there is why I was turning listeners into fans or customers into evangelists. Like that's the, that's what the holy grail of marketing is, right, Kevin? Like, it's absolutely, you want the lead, of course you do. You want the sale, but then you want the megaphone, the flywheel of evangelists. And that's what we were being taught how to do in radio. Um, so I took all these ideas and packaged them up and didn't really communicate what I was doing, but I took them to a, a little company, you know, called Walmart, and I got them 130% ROI year over year for three years with what became the prototype for lately.

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Speaker 2: (05:16)

So what exactly did lately do, right, for Walmart and uh, for other marketers who've started to experiment with it or are using it heavily?

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Speaker 1: (05:26)

Yeah. So, and that's the question. At, at the time, what we had done was, um, there was this very unsexy industry called Marketing Resource management. And it had one big player called Percolate. They rose to the top and then had a fiery death, and then no, um, venture capitalist would would touch that market anymore. So at the time, I built this spreadsheet system for Walmart that was designed to be a marketing resource management system, lots of spreadsheets, thousands, tens of thousands of rows, um, pulling together not only their social media activities and content, but I was looking for the patterns within and then taking what worked and translating it to paid or looking at the blogs we were writing and how can I glean that information. And there were, there were, um, over 20,000 marketers over those, over those three year project with Walmart. So I have a lot of information to look at.

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Speaker 1: (06:18)

And they were from, um, businesses that were small, medium, large for-profit, nonprofit. It was Bank of America at and t Goodwill, um, United Way Worldwide National Disability Institute, and the IRS. So like, holy acronyms, Kevin, as you can imagine, um, Walmart owned a piece of software that was designed to help empower the poor through tax credits and financial education. And, um, people living under the poverty line were many of their employees. So they had like a large interest in, in doing this project. Um, so when we built Lately, which is my company, we were, um, thinking, okay, well let's just, let's try to democratize this. Let's give everybody the ability to do what Kate did for Walmart for 140 grand. So like a, a small business person, and to basically create a marketing army. And we would create one feature for each of the worksheets inside my spreadsheet system.

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Speaker 1: (07:10)

That was the idea. And as we were, so we ended up creating an enterprise platform that we were trying to sell to SMBs, which was crazy, but we didn't know that , so we're like the opposite of Percolate, you know, like per percolate for, for dummies or for the, the, the maker. Um, but there's this one feature that everybody liked, and no, this is not gonna sound amazing anymore, but it was amazing back in 2014. So imagine you just pushed a button and you got 40 social posts instantly that were tied to your analytics and in your voice, and you could schedule them out over time in just a few seconds across all the employees social media platforms, your brand. Like I had 20,000 marketers I was trying to unite. So I made this like big, huge, um, bicycle spoke brand hierarchy, right? Um, but that's when it was, it was in 2017, I believe.

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Speaker 1: (08:08)

Um, we were in an accelerator and someone came along was like, would you like to meet the folks at IBM Watson and learn a few things? And we were like, yeah, that sounds great. Um, so from there, we just started doubling down on, on the ai. And, um, you know, we didn't, we we, we don't have a large language model. That's not how we work. We have no language model. We focus on the AI around the math. So you give me your data, so your model, all of your social analytics is what we're looking at. And then I'm putting my math on that, extracting the patterns, and I'm helping you re reproduce, um, old content and brand new content that I know will be super high performing for you.

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Speaker 2: (08:51)

That that's really awesome. Uh, one of the things, you know, when you're building stuff that, uh, that relies on existing data and to, to sort of, uh, interpolate it and then predict what might work in the future is you, you have sort of, uh, critical mass issues with regards to, you know, you need some data in there, right? And then all of a sudden you reach a tipping point where it's statistically relevant, whether you're using old school regression or you are using other forms of math, uh, you know, linear algebra, linear programming, et cetera. There's a, one way or another, you need enough data in there so that a learning system can learn unless you're borrowing somebody else's data, right? So a lot of the AI platforms out there sort of, well, in lieu of your own data, we'll go look at competitor data, for example, right? So that, you know, uh, raised pizza can maybe learn from Domino's or little Cs, right? And so I, I'd love to hear how you're thinking about that from the perspective of like, particularly in the SMB category, which I hate because I've tried to sell into the SB

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Speaker 1: (09:51)

Category. . Yeah. I hate it too.

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Speaker 2: (09:53)

Previous ventures, you know, they have no money in their high maintenance. So I prefer mid-market, and I actually don't particularly like enterprise either because you have a, a 24 month sales cycle at the enterprise level, and you sort of, that that middle is where people can be nimble and also have budget. So, but, but you know, as we think about even some of those mid-market organizations who may be never really bought into social, maybe because their categories are a little bit boring, right? To be honest, right? And, and they don't, you know, they don't always have anything to talk about or they don't have an anything to comment on. And so they, the, the data lake may be a little bit dry, right? So how does, yeah. How do you see, you know, a way to maybe accelerate the, the, that kind of a marketer into effective social media advertising if they're sort of a little late to starting the marathon, right? They're gonna have to run extra fast.

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Speaker 1: (10:47)

Yeah. I, I stuck a lot of forks in my eyes as you were talking there, , because I've been , you know, we've, we've pivoted to all those categories Yeah. Previously, um, and have found some consistencies within them, which has been surprising. But, you know, what you're saying is, is true. Like not everybody is amazing. And, and certainly like, you know, if you are, if you're hopeless, I'm not gonna fairy godmother you into Gary Vaynerchuk. I mean, this is not gonna happen. Um, so we do have some free qualifications for the customers we know will succeed, but to your point, um, so we have, we have four moats. So, so the first is let's look at your actual data, analyze that and find the best of, right, right? That's the first. The second thing is me, so, like I said, my Uber power turning listeners into fans.

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Speaker 1: (11:33)

So when I write posts on LinkedIn, I get 86,000 views. So we took hundreds of my best practices that I use at my agency, Walmart, and we'll bolster your best practices based on what, you know, we know. And it can be customized very much like a hundred percent fine tuned into your voice and your audience, you know, and 'cause I can see, maybe your writing won't be great, but I could see from your analytics what makes your unique audience click, like common and share, and to make sure to always pepper that, you know, within. Sure. And then lately we'll also look at my brand. So, um, you know, we've been a startup for a long time and you know, we're always looking to pi pinch some pennies and use our own products to market ourselves. And we have a 98% tryout to sale conversion 'cause the brand dog foods itself, right? So we have a lot of best practices there that we're able to then draw on as well. And then the last place, kind of to your point is we never share the best practices of our customers at all, but we can see the patterns within and then use those two to help you out as well.

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Speaker 2: (12:40)

Yeah. I've got a related question, right? And it, it plagues probably like 70% of my clients and over the years as well as current clients, which is that the, there's like a brand voice Yeah. But then there's some cases where there's also sort of an internal evangelist who's a human, right? Yeah. And if we sort of think through the years, especially if you lived in New York at the time, I mean, over the years there've been all sorts of cases where the brand is sort of synonymous with the individual, right? And nationally it would be like, uh, Frank Purdue for chicken, like Sure, yeah. The Purdue and the Purdue, like they were synonymous, right? In the New York region, we had Tom Carve, right, who was the car brand, right? And, and then we had crazy Eddie who was this guy who owned electronics Retailer, right? , I

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Speaker 1: (13:28)

Remember him

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Speaker 2: (13:28)

Well. And, and, and these, these were like inseparable. Like the brand voice and the human voice were the same. But, you know, most companies have have separated those out, uh, partially because the investment investment community doesn't want like the brand of the individual and the brand to be synonymous, because now you're like, if anything happens to the individual, where's the, where's the enterprise value? Right? Right. So they're like, no, no, the brand has to be, its, has have its own voice, but it influencers have proved that the human voice matters, right? And somehow now some brands are going back to, well, I don't really have an interesting voice of my own, but you know, maybe I can a little rent a little bit of the car, a cardia, a Kardashian voice, right? Or take a little piece of that, right? So they're like stuck in this conundrum because like, the brand is boring, right?

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Speaker 2: (14:18)

Doesn't really have its own voice. Yeah. They could try to find an internal evangelist, but then they're sort of stuck with, with that situation. You've even got big brands like, you know, progressive. I don't know how much flow makes at the moment, but I'm guessing it's pretty good, right? Yeah. where they almost create their own monster, right? And they're like, okay, we created this person who is a person with, that's part of the brand voice, but now, you know, we're sort of stuck with them, right? So there are a lot of nuances to that as it relates to creating evangelisms around a brand and, and, and also leveraging the humanity of an individual, right? And maybe the AI individual is what they have to create so they don't have to pay flow anymore, you know, because at least Geico's, gecko doesn't ask for a raise, right? Right. , um, so, you know, like how, how, how do, how does one like construct that and reconstruct that when one's starting to think about, okay, I've got my brand and obviously I'm looking to build enterprise value for my brand. I'm looking to build sales for my brand. I'm looking to engage and delight my consumers as a brand, but it doesn't really have a voice or the voice that it has doesn't have a personality to it.

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Speaker 1: (15:25)

Yeah. I mean, this is a huge problem. People are bad at marketing . This is why we're both in business Yes.

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Speaker 2: (15:33)

Pays our bills, right?

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Speaker 1: (15:34)

Yeah. Yeah. Pay the bills. You know, and I, and I like to, you know, come back to like the core of things, which is, you know, our challenge is always, it's the same as it was before, generative ai, which is how do we cut through the noise? That's the problem, right? Yeah. How do we stand out? How do we be not boring? You know, even when we're selling, you know, hoses or whatever it is, um, hospital parts, I mean, I don't know, accounting, sorry, accountants. Um, but what I found marketing, the IRS, let me tell you that even the IRS has fans, believe it or not, you know, um, and the, the way that I tell people is a couple of things is to find that you touch on it, find the humanity within your brand. Everything is relatable somehow. You know, we talked about nostalgia and memory and emotion.

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Speaker 1: (16:23)

These are all things that you can weave into the conversation so that people will have a reaction. That's the, that's what we want, right? Reactions, make people do something, lean forward, smile, cry, whatever the reaction is, they have to have like some kind of emotion with you. Um, and the experiment is there. Like obviously, you know, as far as venture capitalists go, I kind of say, let me have this happy problem with being so big that you can't separate me from the brand. Then we can worry about that. Like, . You know, I mean, come on. Um, but like the, with the ai, what we've learned is so, so collaborative AI is a thing. Harvard Business Review has done a few articles they've cited lately as a leader in collaborative ai. And what their studies have shown is that collaborative AI outperforms AI alone, uh, two to seven X all the time across the board, right?

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Speaker 1: (17:18)

And so that's the act of a human course correcting the results, analyzing and course correcting them, right? And so that's the part where the human can come in and say, okay, AI voice, you're sounding a little too robotic for us, or too many emojis. This is not on brandand for us. It's just, you know, you've pushed us too far. What we've learned, and this is interesting, I mean, so I'm in the business of finding out what words will get people to do what you want them to do. That's what I care about. So I'm always looking at the patterns within those words, and I can see, so here's some basic tips for the listeners that we can see across the board. All right? Number one, if you read what you write out loud first before you publish it, and you trip over it in any way with your mouth, if the words are i'll, I'll give you an example.

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Speaker 1: (18:06)

I've got one here somewhere. That's so good. Um, so this is a, this is a coupon from West Elm. I like to buy their pillows a lot. They sent me this in the snail mail. This certificate is issued for reward purposes and is a duplicate of the certificate you received by email, which can be accessed@community.com. Ugh. Did you hear that? I mean, I'm a professional. So like a lot of annunciation there. Yeah. What they're trying to say to me is, Hey, dummy, we sent you another coupon in your email and you can't use both of these. Okay? That's all they're trying to say. So that's a lot easier.

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Speaker 2: (18:41)

A lawyer got a hold of it though,

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Speaker 1: (18:43)

. That's right. Of course. You know, and they used to tell us in radio like, we would rip and read from the Associated Press. So here comes the weather. You know, I'm, I'm ripping it off the, the dot matrix and it would say all these complicated things about the weather, but all I had to say is it might rain today. Don't leave your house without an umbrella, right? Yeah. So same idea. So that's the first test. The second thing I'll just give you, like, I can go on and on, but I'll just give you two or three quick tips, is I always back into the problem. So on social media specifically, Kevin, as you know, there's two objectives. Click or share. That's what we want, right? And so we wanna look at the writing and, and see if it's geared to any of those things.

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Speaker 1: (19:23)

Clicking is hard. It is hard to get clicks because people have to trust you in order to get clicks. You can, you can't say things like, Hey, check out my blog. 'cause why the hell would I do that? What's in it for me? Nothing. You're not giving me any reason. Why should I spend this time? What's the value? So you have to convey the value very quickly. 'cause I have no time when I'm scrolling just like everybody else, and we're judgy and whatever, you know? So like, it's gotta be a quick thing. Get taller in five seconds, , whatever, you know, eat, eat this pill and your hair will be blonde for life. I don't care. Um, but then sharing is very, is much easier because sharing is about the ego. Um, like when you share someone else's content, you get credit for what they did, what they created.

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Speaker 1: (20:08)

It's kind of like in college when like somebody shared a great new record with you, and then you pass it on to someone else. Now you're the pacemaker, right? So that's why those one-liners do so well. Um, even if they're, they're corny, but like, you know, um, may you be kind and free throughout your day. , whatever. , like that stuff gets the most shares. It's the, it's the one-liners and it's the controversial stuff, of course. You know, the last sort of favorite tip I have is, um, people, especially women, tend to undercut the value of what they're saying. I do it all the time. And there's some key words to stay away from, which are needy. Needy person is needy. You're gonna be on the needy team. Um, like probably, maybe those are all like weak wishy-washy words. You don't wanna say, I think you wanna say, I know the reason I want you to do this is because when you sound like an authority, you are commanding trust. And you have to get that trust to get that click has to be there. You wanna be the authority.

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Speaker 2: (21:08)

Cool. Well, you know, what's fascinating about the social media ecosystem now is that some of the, you know, I I guess you'd say more rapidly growing parts of the ecosystem, uh, like TikTok, I mean, it's almost impossible for there to be a click action, right? Share action. Certainly very doable. Like action, pretty doable. Um, that's right. But you know, they're designed for you not to click, right? It is designed that you either you, you do, you either do some other positive behavior and then you go off to the next one, right? It, it, so for marketers, that makes it a little more challenging. 'cause you know, they used to like a Twitter or a Facebook old school, right? Which was, oh yeah, the link was right there, super easy. I, you know, I have some call to action. The person sees the link or knows where the link is.

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Speaker 2: (21:57)

They can take the link and off they go. And, and now they're in my environment right now. They're where I wanted them to be, right? TikTok and no control, not so much, right? So, and YouTube sort of sits in the middle, which is, you know, I guess they could put a link below and, you know, but not for shorts, right? So, yeah, you know, it, it it's, the social media marketer has a little bit of a conundrum, right? Because it would seem that you're sort of stuck with upper funnel, warm fuzzies, emotional hooks, right? Um, mm-Hmm. . But at the same time, you'd like to be able to demonstrate to somebody in marketing that it actually moved the needle, right? That's right. Yeah. So, so, so bridging that gap for these social media platforms that are not click centric, right? That's right. Yeah. What are some best practices that are perhaps a little bit different for those platforms versus sort of a, uh, an X or a Facebook where you can still, you know, click out?

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Speaker 1: (22:50)

Yeah, I was thinking, so, so you, you mentioned Kim Kardashian. So I'm a fan of Skims and what, and what against my better judgment, but I mean, I can't help it. And I, I love to steal ideas and make them my own. And so I've been thinking a lot about, you know, the FOMO that they've done there. So, I mean, the first thing she did was she made the stuff we wear closest to our skin in like 12 different shades of skin color, which was brilliant, ingenious, right now it's very inclusive in that way. And the second thing she did is she made everybody's body like glorified no matter what size you are. Um, and then the third thing they're doing, which I love, is this, is this drop. It's not like you can go to the store and there's like a limited numbers of T-shirts available. There's only a few, and they're always running out. Like, so she's got me, you

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Speaker 2: (23:38)

Know, scarcity. Sure, yeah,

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Speaker 1: (23:39)

Yeah. God, it's so good. And, and also sex sells, right? And you can see, like, while she does celebrate other bodies, for the most part it's, it's very good looking woman. And I've been thinking a lot about how this applies to software . 'cause that's my job. And I am, um, convinced, um, I've got some, I've got some ideas brewing here, but I'm convinced that Instagram, for example, is not only for CPGs and we've all seen like HubSpot not do a great job on Instagram. Even even Jasper, you know, I mean, I'm watching these things, of course, 'cause it's my, my wheelhouse, and they don't tap into any of those things we just talked about, by the way. And so I'm like, well, why not? There has to be a way, there always is a way to metaphorically apply like somebody else's. It's like the, um, what was the, um, remember the water, the ice bucket challenge? Yeah. Yeah. Everybody suddenly wanted an ice bucket challenge. What's ice bucket

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Speaker 2: (24:35)

Challenge? It only worked once. ,

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Speaker 1: (24:37)

It only worked once, right? You know, like, uh, but I, like, again, this is where, where that human connection comes in. You know, like, I'm not going to do this, but could I make lately se sexy? Of course I could. I mean, our, our icon is me, Caly Caly from lately, right? So like, I could just boost a few things up here and put it out there. Um, but that's not really on brand, so I'm not gonna do that. Um, but anyways, I I, back to the AI business, which I think is really important is that as companies are navigating this, this, um, arena now there's, they're, they're starting to cotton onto I think what you and I knew already, which is, hey, fast is great, don't get me wrong, but fast is also cheap . So you need to, like Salesforce says, ask more of your ai, right? We're here now, guys, this is not automation, it's artificial intelligence. So if all it's doing is giving you a lunch break, but it's not giving you more sales, then you need to really rethink like how you're using the ai. And I think this is the year that people are starting to, to count onto that,

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Speaker 2: (25:48)

Right? Right. So for those folks who are out there, you know, and social is a big part of their overall marketing mix, uh, both organic search, social, which of course the algorithms are in the right, in the midst of changing, right? We're used to be all about the who, who's posting. And now it's more about the post than it is about the who, right? Because individual posts can sort of break out of the who, um, at least in most of the platforms now. So how, how should marketers think about that as they, you know, try to find a way to delight their prospects and customers, you know, and, and, and how can AI help them do that more effectively?

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Speaker 1: (26:27)

Yeah, I mean, it's the cliche be yourself, . Of course it still, it still is. But that, the thing is, is that charisma is not a taught value. You either have it or you don't. You can't learn it, right? So yeah, cutting through the noise is, is is difficult. That's why again, you and I are in business. Um, I like to, I mean, I like, I love writing people's biographies. It's my, it's one, it's one thing I love doing because people often don't know what's great about themselves and they're, or they're hiding it, right? And so that's my favorite thing is just to talk to someone and see if I can give them like four or five lines that highlight, you know, what they're wonderful at. And then once you can do that, you can show, you can show that on social media, you know? Yeah. One thing I I like to say to people is, and, and we met in, in a, at a mixer is like, imagine you're so at a mixer or meetup or whatever that is mixer like, so old school , what do they call it? A meetup these days? You're outta hang.

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Speaker 2: (27:24)

I think the c-suite, which is where we met, still calls it a mixer, but that's 'cause a mixer. Okay. Yeah. That's 'cause the, the CEO and founder of c-suite are also from the mixer generation. ,

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Speaker 1: (27:34)

You mix it up, it's an in-person event, right? You're glad handing whatever. Um, so when you're there, the goal is to not, I believe is you don't need to be the center of the attention. What you wanna be is the person that's making everybody else feel like the center of attention, right? So it's more like, it's more like a magnetic idea. When, when you're doing that, when someone walks away feeling like, wow, that I feel so great after talking to that person, they never forget you . And it's, this is fans into evangelists, customers, right? Customers and evangelists, uh, listeners into fans. That's what I'm thinking about all the time. Like I say to my team, don't make a sale, make a fan. 'cause it's so much more valuable, right? And people, like you said, like if there's not a link there, this is my behavior on Instagram.

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Speaker 1: (28:24)

I know not to go to the click the link in the bio. 'cause then I'm gonna have cookie hell, but I do go into Google, right? And type it in manually all the time. So they're getting me, it's even more powerful than clicking a link. I'm actually having to remember the company, maybe search it and go type it in. And that's what I wanna, I want people to do when they walk away from experience with me or anyone at my company or with my software. Even if they don't become a customer, I want them to walk away being like, wow. And, and that's what we do, right? So not a day since 2019, not a day has passed where someone hasn't spontaneously written about us on social media.

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Speaker 2: (29:04)

Well, congrats for that, . Thanks.

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Speaker 1: (29:07)

It works though. I mean, you know, this is, this is the job of, of, of artificial intelligence, right? And, and that's why I was saying like, ask more of what it's, what it's getting for you guys. Like, or, and by you guys, I mean, you know, the listeners and you know, in general, like, is it, is it life changing for you because it should be life changing for you. And if it's not you, it's not cutting through the noise. It's just making more, more noise to put out there and, and, uh, you're not doing anybody a favor, .

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Speaker 2: (29:37)

So we talked about the fact that some industries perhaps, uh, are not, uh, synonymous with emotion. I mean, we right. Apologizing to accountants, I mean, maybe the Fas b rules are super exciting to some people , they evangelize those all day long. But, you know, uh, emotion in the end is sort of what you're trying to get to the root of, right? Is how do we delight the people who are consuming the content and, and trigger emotions? Um, that's right. And whether that was way back in your DJ days and the way that you created that connection and stimulated the emotion. Um, now, you know, we we're looking to potentially to use ai, right? Which, which almost sounds evil or inauthentic. Like, oh my God, I'm going to use, I'm going to use AI to, to, to trigger emotion. But at the same time as marketers were like, well, I gotta stay in business and I gotta sell these widgets, you know, and they, and they, they are really great. They do solve a problem, right? So it's, it's, it's, that's my objective to try to figure out how, you know, how to delight everybody and solve a problem. So how should marketers, you know, think that through and, and, and take these more boring categories and infuse them with emotion?

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Speaker 1: (30:44)

Yeah. You know, it's so hard. I mean, the, again, cutting through the noise is where we're, where we're still at. And I, whether, I mean, believe me, I had to write marketing strategy for tax prep , you know, but like, what I thought about was, was this, if you're getting a $2,000 EITC tax credit and you make $20,000 a year, that is actually life changing money. What are people doing with this money? Those are the story, those are the stories we were looking for, right? What, what can happen when you have this information and the relatability, I'm just talking about this for a second. Like is, you know, someone would be like, well, how could they, how are they living without this knowledge or whatever? And I was like, well, I grew up my, I remember being five or six years old and someone bought me, I had a checkbook and somebody gave me 20 bucks, and my mom walked me into the bank and we deposited it, and I, she had me write down the numbers, you know, and then there was an allowance.

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Speaker 1: (31:44)

And so that kind of behavior is not automatic, right? And so getting people to relate to understanding, like, this is the, this college is the same way. People who've never been told to go to college, don't go to college because it was not, it's not part of the lexicon of like how they're, you know, behaving or whatever. So I like to think about, um, so I have a friend, you, I gotta introduce you to him. His name is David Allison. He owns the value graphics database and he consults the United Nations. What David has uncovered after doing, uh, millions of surveys across every country in the globe and in multiple languages, is that there are 54 values, AKA drivers of human behavior. Okay? So like productivity, community, the environment, family. There's reasons why we purchase reasons why we do what we, what we do, right? Everyone has like some other thing behind it. So if you can understand the values that your customers have, and now they have multiple ones, this is so important. We are multi multifaceted humans. One thing doesn't move all of us. And that's the point you need to sell, not just one. It's not just this narrow ICP sorry to swear, but like that drives, drives me crazy. You know, it's,

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Speaker 2: (32:56)

It's New York, we're, you know, we're in New York, so

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Speaker 1: (32:58)

It's New York, okay, yeah. We'll say it. Yeah, yeah. . So like the, the , the the, when you widen the folks and understand that people are going, you can say, and lately does this, all right? But you can say the same thing multiple ways and get different people to take action for sure, right? Yeah. And in fact, you have to, because now we are all onto it. We don't want to be spammed anymore. And so there's this conundrum that, you know, well, the old marketing adage was seven times you had to have contact with the product before you even knew they existed, right? So that's why like a million commercials, we used to play the same song 300 times to hope you in one week. Hopefully you would hear it once. Right Now, uh, it is 24 times that something has to pass your eyeballs or whatever to sink in.

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Speaker 1: (33:45)

So that quantity still has to be there. But if you keep saying, I have, have a Coke and a smile over and over again, I'm like, dude, you're spamming me. I'm out. Right? So you need these variables, the variations, and each of the variations can touch on different, um, drivers, different values behind what you're, what it is you're selling, right? So like, if I'm selling, um, this pencil and I understand that the value that's gonna drive a certain group of my, my clientele is, um, you know, the environment that I'm gonna let them know that this was made in Cedar Key, Florida, the cedar capital of, you know, the world , they only use all natural products and I don't know, whatever, I'm just making up a bunch of stuff, you know? Um, but if I'm gonna sell it to someone else who's like family is their thing, I'm gonna be like, this is a family owned business. 20 people run it, . I don't know. You get what I'm saying? Yeah,

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Speaker 2: (34:37)

Sure.

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Speaker 1: (34:37)

Um, so I think like, and this is all down to just asking your customers and learning about your customers. I, I we're going through this, this process right now of where we're, we're, we're guessing, you know? And I was like, Hey guys, uh, why don't you call some people up and ask them some questions? And they're like, oh. And I'm like, I know we have their phone numbers 'cause we collect it. when they put a credit card in, they're like, we can just send them. We sent them an email last week and nobody responded. I'm like, yeah, call them. Someone will answer the phone. And if you guys can't make, I know that I could make them answer the phone. I can figure out how to text somebody or get it in a conversation. Like it's not that hard to do. And guess what? You actually really only need to talk like three people, and chances are one of them or two of them will say some of the same stuff and you got your answer right. Move on. Iterate. Yeah.

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Speaker 2: (35:23)

Cool. Well, l lots of stuff for people to th chew on and think about as they, you know, take their businesses and, um, try to, you know, reinvigorate them with emotion and get their, their prospects and customers to engage. And, uh, obviously lately do AI is how they'll find you if they need to. Uh, thanks so much for joining me on the, on the podcast. Great stuff.

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Speaker 1: (35:46)

I love you Kevin. Thanks so much.

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